The current NAND price is approaching a turning point rapidly. At the current price about $5 for a 8 gb NAND chip, the cost for a 30 GB flash disk is about $150, the transfer from HD to NAND used in MP3/video players will be massive.
Another transition that is going to, or already happening, is NAND replacing DV tape. I am using a Canon S3 for both digital photography and video - replacing my Sony TRV900 I bought in the end of 1999. The Sony TRV 900 uses 3CCD and was, and still is, the top line among DV camcorders. However, the video quality generated by the Canon S3 is superior to DV tape generated by the Sony TRV 900. In addition, the Canon S3 digital camera is much lighter and smaller than the Sony TRV900. The only problem is that it consumes large memory space - 2 M Bytes per second. That means a 4 GByte SD card can only record about 2000 seconds, or 33 minutes, video.
With the NAND price reduction, it becomes much practical to use the digital camera as a camcorder. We will see the massive conversion from DV camcorder to high-quality digital camera/camcorder that uses NANS in the next few months/years.
Still, the NAND in cellphone for high quality photos/video/mp3 and GPS will generate huge revenue for NAND manufacturers, too. |
