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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (9929)	5/14/1999 1:42:00 PM
From: Pacing The Cage	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10072

1. Current CLIK! cannot do this. Must wait for the future... Bulls always like looking to the 'future'. Agreed, but isn't looking to the 'future' what investing is all about? :-) 2. Your scenario basically assumed a built-in CLIK!. You are correct, I should have mentioned that in my post. The problems: - price of a built-in CLIK! vs. a built-in floppy (10x) Do you know that for a fact?! I would expect that the cost would be somewhat higher than for a standard floppy drive, but I don't believe that the OEM price would be 10x as much. I would expect the OEM price to be less than $50.00 (US). - power consumption. No camera running off AA batteries anymore I'm not sure that the current batch of digital cameras use AA batteries. I know that my 35mm uses two very expensive specialized batteries, and I seem to remember seeing my friend recharging his Mavica. Any experts care to comment on this one? - How can manufacturers eat the cost of including the CLIK? Same question as above, we don't REALLY know what the OEM cost for a built in Clik! will be, do we? Somehow Sony manages to "eat" the cost of a built in floppy drive, and AGFA has already signed up to build Clik! into one of their cameras, so it must be do-able. - These cameras need to be very expensive, pricing it out of the low -> mid range Same thing restated again in a different way. We can't know that they "will need to be very expensive" when we don't have OEM pricing information. - Reliability. Is CLIK! & it's disks a consumer product? Right now, it's not. You cannot move the drive with the 'film' in it, you cannot write on the disks without losing data (use a felt tip!) I don't have any reliability data in front of me, but I think you will have to agree that those same warnings could be found on most consumer electronics as a CYA for the manufacturers. I know my 8mm video camera had a similar warning about transporting it with a tape in it, and I would imagine that if someone read the fine print that you shouldn't walk around with your Mavica with a floppy in it. Floppy disks have always carried the warnings that you should write on the label BEFORE putting it on the disk and you should only put one label on a disk at a time, although hardly anybody pays attention to them. (I have seen a floppy disk get caught in the drive mechanism because it had two labels on it, but it is extremely rare). Most people violate these warnings without any ill effects, and that is what I am expecting to happen with Clik!, but the manufacturers must put warning labels on everything to avoid lawsuits. But... You knew that :-) -Ken

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (9929)	5/14/1999 5:16:00 PM
From: jfs	Respond to of 10072

Ken, here's the Agfa press release announcing "plans to develop digital imaging products with the Clik! Built-In. It is expected that such products will be available from Agfa in the second quarter of 1999." agfahome.com Seems a pretty safe assumption (>90%) that these products (note plural) will at least make it to market, though how successful they will be is of course open to question. I think that the similarity of clik discs to film for handling and particularly for storage of images - rather than burying them in hard drive backups that most people don't do anyway - will be a strong selling point. Even though I think that digital cameras will expand the picture-taking market and take an increasing share of it, I agree with you than digital cameras alone will not make clik a blockbuster success like Zip. regards, john