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

To: Tumbleweed who wrote (2566)	2/16/1998 12:02:00 PM
From: JJB	Respond to of 60323

Attended the PMA show in Nawlans ending yesterday. A couple of observations. SNDK booth was half way back small but adequate. If your showing a new product such as CF with the "48 meg" on the card instead of "8 meg" it isn't quite as impressive as a new camera. Same goes with the Imagemate (CF reader) looks like a mouse with a thick cable and slot. Booth has more of an OEM feel to it than trying to establish a "Sandisk" brand franchise. This was in contrast to the substantially larger IOM booth up front location. There were a number of attractive models (female) in spandex dresses beckoning visitors. IOM has shown at PMA before, Zip and backup up systems are standard accessory of serious digital photography. The push was clearly on Click! as a digital camera medium. There were no Click! based products but a wall was plastered with the logos of all the major digital camera players. This is very surprising in the Camera biz, as brand identities are the family jewels. I wouldn't be surprised if a number of inquiries were placed as who had given IOM permission to display their logos. Also the high end Erickson mobile phone was shown next to a Clik! Diskette no clarification was available Clik! Status hadn't changed. Projected second half ship date. Two versions, one a hand help which would allow for remote downloads of digital camera (I guess cameras with CF or other solid state memory). Also an OEM version for inside camera. My impression is that the internal version is bulky and being mechanical a hard sell to camera designers. I don't understand the need for a remote downloads as most digital camera will allow LCD viewing and deletions or swap out of solid state memory. Anyway isn't the Zip drive for storing stuff? The $10.00 cost per 40 Meg disk is nice. The $200 for drive is not. I don't know the cost of the internal part of a CF writer / reader but based on Imagemate $100 it must be substantially lower than that. I did not see, but Fuji was showing the new SmartMedia 3 « diskette reader. As this has been out in Japan there was user reaction. It is slower than a regular diskette reader. SmartMedia also has a reputation for being subject to breaking when not carefully handled (thin) as opposed to CF which is easy to lose (thicker but more compact in overall dimensions). From a show point of view I would say that it was more successful for CF than SNDK. Instead of a wall of companies that might use Click! virtually all the majors Canon, Panasonic, Kodak, were demoing CF products. It would have been nice to see Imagemate also being demoed (even if only OEM). I'll drop other impressions as they occur (calls and mail to answer). jjb