Steve, you ask if the MMC and smaller capacity CF are redundant. Because MMC is physically smaller than CF, it will do certain kinds of things better, such as providing the storage for really small music players. This application dooms the players that use Sony's MemoryStick. It's just large enough for potential customers to prefer the MMC. Also, it seems to me that we may see some cameras designed around the MMC, now that capacities of 64 to 128 mb are available.
I agree that it's just a matter of time before the more serious photographers will want to own one, if not two 256mb flash cards. Think of taking your Nikon 990 on a long vacation, where it is not convenient to transfer the images to your computer's disk storage. However, I've also found that with my Nikon 950, the tiff images contain really more resolution than I need, except when I want to enlarge only a portion of the frame. I now make most of my shots in jpg, partly, as you have noted, because it takes too long to write a tiff image to the CF. The write time for 2.1 mb resolution is about 30 seconds--far too long.
Every sophisticated device involves some sort of compromise. If you want small size, you may sacrifice lens size, aperture, or batteries or electronics. I'd like to know whether the professional cameras by Nikon and Canon, used routinely in news photography, also have slow write times. It's more likely that the flash card is not the bottleneck, but instead, the lack of sufficient buffer that would allow consecutive shots at short intervals, without waiting to write the image to the flash card. To crowd every possible feature into a package as small as the Nikon 990/950 seems almost impossible at the moment, but just wait a couple years.
Art |
