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No one here (except maybe Rocky) realizes the magnitude of the fatal
flaw of the Clik: Power consumption.
Typical flash cards draw about 10-20microamps. A floppy drive can
draw 2000+ times that amount. Clik!, being a mechanical device, and
following the laws of Physics, will have a difficult time (if not
impossible) drawing less than 100x of flash cards.
The most critical parameter for handheld devices IS power consumption.
Total storage capacity and cost/Mbyte is much farther down on the
list. (below mechanical robustness, weight, etc..)
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Power consumption is a problem in digital cameras, but you're looking in the wrong place for the power consumption. It's not the flash card or Clik! that's the big power drain - it's the LCD screen used to display the image and the pop of the light flash for taking indoor pictures that are the big power drains.
Iomega has stated that power consumption for writing 1 meg to a Clik! disk to be comparable to lighting a Christmas light for 1 second. Ok, then how many Christmas lights is equivalent to a pop of the flash. I'm guessing quite a few. One or two pops of the flash is probably more than enough to power the writing of an entire Clik! disk.
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About cost/Mbyte: don't forget that the customer foots much of the
bill in a flash card solution, BUT the manufacture foots much of the
bill in a CLIK! based solution. (Since the drive needs to be embedded
in the product). In other words, a flash card solution cost MUCH LESS
to manufacture than a Clik! solution.
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Before I saying anything about this, will you agree with me that the future of digital camera require much higher resolution, sharper pictures? If you agree, let's use a 1 megpixel pictures as a baseline for digital cameras in the future (say next year).
You say a flash card solution cost MUCH LESS to manufacture than a Clik! solution, but then which camera is better? Your 4 meg flash camera takes say 4 to 8 megapixel pictures. My Clik! takes as 40-80 pictures and many more if I buy more disks. Now is my Clik! camera worth the extra hundred dollars? Some people may say yes some people no. But I think most people buying digital cameras will say yes, because you're not going to be able to use the 4 to 8 picture flash camera the way you use a film camera today. What do you do when you've filled up your flash? Go back home to your PC? Sure you can go out and get a 32meg flash card. But then now you've spent more money than you would have if you bought a Clik! camera.
>>>>>>>>
So the question is: what is Click's value proposition for a product
company? More cost, more support circuitry, higher power.. What does
the manufacture gain? This is where I have the most problems..
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Clik! will enable digital cameras to become a mainstream item. A Clik! camera will give you high quality pictures and you can use it like you use a film camera now. Flash is currently too expensive to put enough of it in a digital camera to take large numbers of high resolution pictures and will be for the forseeable future. Even when flash drops to $1 per meg in the next century, it will still be too expensive because camera resolution will continue to increase, and the price of Clik! will also decrease while increasing capacity.
Joon |
