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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (32667)	10/1/2000 12:14:38 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

There still are some kinks to be worked out. As someone stated recently on this thread, the value chain is still short one important link, image viewing. I beg to differ. There may be new opportunities for viewing which will help fuel the market, such as web posting, e-mail, or as yet undeveloped combinations of high resolution viewers and memory which one might use in place of an album, but all else failing we have inkjet printing ... think about it ... the printer is capable of 1440x720 so, to print an 8x10 and have one pixel in the image to one pixel in the print we need ... well, it isn't quite that simple, but the print side of things is way ahead of the camera side. The print side is so close to competitive to conventional film and paper that large percentages of even professional photogs could convert to digital darkrooms today, but there is still a gap to be concerned about on the camera side. unless you are a serious hobbyist and decide to purchase a high resolution inkjet printer Really serious inkjet printers are dirt cheap, especially considering that they are multi-purpose. I think your concerns are valid, but recall that file sizes of less than 500KB are perfectly adequate for 4x6 and 5x7 prints in cameras with 2.1 megapixel resolution and above. This is a threshold issue. To be sure, for low end requirements, compressed images from the higher end cameras are already comfortably past the snapshot level for small prints. There may be some disappointment when one takes that great shot of the kiddy's birthday and tries to turn it into an 8x10, but.... The bottom line here is that while compressed JPEGs do very well at preserving image information and the difference between compressed and uncompressed may be of importance to only the fussiest of consumers, the fact of the matter is that pixel density is headed skyward whether or not people really need it. Compression helps, but it doesn't mean that a 16Mp source image still only takes the space of a compressed 2Mp image. Most of the following photos have file sizes under 50KB. To view file size, right click the photo and click "properties"... And we are viewing these in what medium ... a monitor which in my case is 1856x1392 pixels (which is probably higher than most on this thread)? That is not enough information to drive more than a few square inches of good inkjet printing. I often view images on screen that look really spectacular, but if I download them and print them they look terrible. If you are worried about cost, SanDisk and Toshiba just announced as single 512Mbit chip which will allow 64 megabytes of storage. Just a year or so ago SanDisk and most competitors needed four (4) 128 Mbit chips to make the same card. Costs will fall! ... and technology will advance, but there is a gap here. Given one CF TII slot in the camera and having to spend the better part of half a thousand dollars to get the top end of the current CF capacity, but having a microdisk that will fit in the same slot and provide 10X+ the capacity at that same cost, there is a real competitive option here. As I see it, the consumer cares little for how the storage happens, unless how is linked to cost, reliability, etc. If the consumer's storage needs are low and there is a very low cost storage medium, e.g., the Sony cameras that use 3.5" floppies and this works for me, then who cares about higher density options. But, if the consumer is one who needs a lot of images or high resolution images or both, then capacity and cost starts to be an issue. Costs per MB on microdrives are falling rapidly too ... possibly even faster than flash.

To: Ausdauer who wrote (32667)	10/1/2000 11:19:03 AM
From: mauser96	Respond to of 54805

Go without hard copies for the time being The cost of making superior archival quality prints will fall as competition increases and printer makers see a mass market, so there's little to lose by waiting a bit. Like most things, I suppose consumers will require varying amounts of resolution but it should assume a bell shaped curve centering on a sweet spot for the mass market. It's hard to know where this point is at this stage. I 've been using a 2.1 MP camera shooting at 1600 x 1200 with some compression to yield 24 prints on a 16MB flashmemory card. Since 24 shot film rolls are the most common size of film sold, I would guess that this would be enough for most occasional users, and the small prints made from this resolution are probably good enough for most customers. Meanwhile, film is still a good buy for many. Yesterday I purchased 4 rolls of Kodacolor 200, 24 exposure for $8.99. I can get prints made for $5.99 a roll, meaning total cost per roll is $2.25 + $5.99 which equals $8.24 per roll or 34 cents per print. Add a bit for sales tax, but you have to pay this on digital stuff too. Eventually, I expect most camera dollars will be spent on digital. However for us to make money out of this , the transition needs to take place with some alacrity. Therefore the speed of the transition rather than the completeness of it may be the critical question for investors. From the standpoint of flash memory, I'm seeing comments on the www that consumers are starting to reject cameras that don't use the CompactFlash standard.I know I'm not going to buy a new digital camera that won't share memory with my Canon s10. The new Nikon 880 (3+ MP, uses Nikon 990 engine)does this and is getting excellent reviews. I may get one- I'm a sucker for expensive gadgets :) regards Luke ( and many thanks for the excellent work you have done in alerting all of us to the potential of SanDisk)