It may very well be that the NIKON 950 uses Sony components for its CCD and related circuitry. Sony CCD technology is very advanced. As to the cost of the Memory Stick, even though it sells for more than a similar capacity CF, it would be impossible at this stage to determine if the price relates to cost or simply to the need to get something out there to compete with CF. As I gain more experience with my NIKON 950, I can assure anyone that the SNDK 96 mb flash card I am using is just barely adequate in terms of capacity. I would prefer 128 mb or more, in order to reduce the number of times I have to upload images to my computer disk drive. I am taking mostly high resolution photos, using the TIFF format - a big consumer of memory. The photo quality in the prints is exceptional, and way, way ahead of what you could get from conventional film and ordinary commercial photolab processing. Imagine having prints without scratches, and with color balance, brightness, contrast, etc. that makes the photo close to the original!
My point is that the CF format looks like the most easy to expand in terms of capacity, and the technology under development jointly by SNDK and Toshiba for higher capacity cards has the potential of making Sony an also ran. It's too early to draw conclusions, but hefty marketing efforts are not necessarily the key factor here. Technology is.
Art |
