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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (8700)	1/19/2000 11:57:00 AM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

John, thanks for the link on the 6.6 megapixel camera. Two important issues here: (1) The size of the chip, covering a 35mm full frame is much larger than what is used now, making it possible to achieve potentially as good resolution as one can get on the finest quality 35mm cameras. We don't know about its light sensitivity, though the description suggests it is about the same as current CCD products, which have about the same effective speed as 100 ASA film. (2) The read/write times, I believe, are partly a function of the software in the camera or other device. For example, the Nikon 950, while it has a rather slow write speed, also has a buffer. When not using the highest resolution setting (uncompressed TIFF), you can shoot a series of photos, which are recorded almost instantly in the camera's buffer, and later written to the CF at a more liesurely pace. By increasing the size of the buffer and providing for automatic writing from the buffer to the CF, the camera designer could virtually eliminate the problem, though the somewhat long period for accessing the image from the CF and displaying it on the LCD is still there. Increasing the buffer size, of course, would increase the price and power consumption. I have to say, though, that even with lower resolution settings, I find that the printer, not the camera, is the key limitation in the quality and sharpness of the final product. In most cases, I'm not enlarging only a small portion of the image, so the resolution of the camera is sufficient. And in terms of overall print size, I have to admit that 8x10 is about all I'm interested in, since the larger sizes use so much ink per print.

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (8700)	1/19/2000 1:18:00 PM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

John, re: toast I didn't bring my 35 mm film camera on my last trip. I am coming to realize that I am less dependent on it and feel more and more comfortable with my digital camera. Having said that, I would feel more secure bringing a standard film camera to a special event like a wedding or a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to an exotic place. re: write speeds SanDisk is more concerned with data integrity and product reliability than write speed. In short, "speed kills". I feel that current product performance is adequate and inadequacies are more related to the digital camera brand than the flash card brand. SanDisk did do a co-licensing deal with SSTI. The write speed enhancements are explained in this link... techweb.com The key to high speed is what SST's product marketing manager Samuel Nakhimovsky calls a "performance formula" that is based largely on the design of the ATA controller. The first part of that formula is a large dual-port SRAM buffer inside the ATA controller, "so you can write to the buffer at the same time that the buffer is writing to flash," Nakhimovsky said. Also, a direct-memory-access channel carries data from the buffer to the flash, eliminating controller overhead, while an intelligent-flash file system writes data files to flash memory "in a sequence that gives the best performance," he added. Other features of SST's cards include a power-management unit and dynamic-memory management. re: OT The potential applicability of high capacity ROM and RAM flash cards is expressed below. As I previously posted, SanDisk will try to get the SD Memory Card (several hundred megabyte capacity?) below a $20 price point, and perhaps as low as a $10 price point by 2005. Infineon expresses similar optimism for competitively price ROM flash. Unlike other flash cards, the Multi-MediaCard accepts mask ROM as well as flash memory. The card was also designed to carry one-time-programmable(OTP) memory, but that option "went by the boards as prices dropped" for flash, said Jeffry Davis, senior marketing manager at Infineon, San Jose. Moreover, a fully automated manufacturing process and low-cost seven-pin serial interface (features drawn from the company's smart-card experience) keep manufacturing costs "in the dirt range," he said. Ausdauer