You know you want to pre-order one...
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Mintmaster
Veteran
Wow, lots of cool toys.
What bugs me is why they haven't made a digital camera with a hard drive yet (though the AV-400 is almost there). This is what I want to see within a couple of years:
-20 GB hard drive
-8 megapixel CCD for still shots
-1024x768 30fps video with MPEG-4 encoding
-at least 10x optical zoom with optical image stabilization
If it was made into a full computer like the OQO...
What bugs me is why they haven't made a digital camera with a hard drive yet (though the AV-400 is almost there). This is what I want to see within a couple of years:
-20 GB hard drive
-8 megapixel CCD for still shots
-1024x768 30fps video with MPEG-4 encoding
-at least 10x optical zoom with optical image stabilization
If it was made into a full computer like the OQO...
Mintmaster said:Wow, lots of cool toys.
What bugs me is why they haven't made a digital camera with a hard drive yet (though the AV-400 is almost there). This is what I want to see within a couple of years:
-20 GB hard drive
-8 megapixel CCD for still shots
-1024x768 30fps video with MPEG-4 encoding
-at least 10x optical zoom with optical image stabilization
If it was made into a full computer like the OQO...
Nah - surely a hard drive would take up too much space/battery life.
20GB of flash memory - now you're talking.
Mintmaster
Veteran
20GB of flash - yeah, that would be nice, but damn expensive!Mariner said:Nah - surely a hard drive would take up too much space/battery life.
20GB of flash memory - now you're talking.
I don't think camcorders should be overly tiny. Fitting a harddrive in the space of a MiniDV tape and it's recording mechanism is a lot easier than in the space of a CF card like the MicroDrives. Size shouldn't be a problem.
Battery life could be a problem, but they could slow it down a lot (1 MB/s should be plenty), and they could spin the harddrive up/down as needed provided they have a buffer. I can't see it being worse than the DVD writer cameras, which do just fine AFAIK.
Why? In a few weeks we will see the first Handy with an 1.5 GB HD. So if an Handy has Accu's big enough to handle an HD any "real" computer should have it too.Mariner said:Nah - surely a hard drive would take up too much space/battery life.
20GB of flash memory - now you're talking.
ZenBearClaw!
Newcomer
HD on digicam?
Why would you want the money and expense of a HD on your digicam? You should use tape since there is hardly any reason to have random access on your Digital Camera esp since you are going to do most of your shooting linearly and you are also going to have to download to a PC/printer sometime so I would much rather have a fast 10gig tape where i could afford to buy lots of media. Though it would be sexy if it were in a nice screen like this. Btw has anyone seen the japanese prototype for the Sony Hi-MD digital camera? Its really cute.
Why would you want the money and expense of a HD on your digicam? You should use tape since there is hardly any reason to have random access on your Digital Camera esp since you are going to do most of your shooting linearly and you are also going to have to download to a PC/printer sometime so I would much rather have a fast 10gig tape where i could afford to buy lots of media. Though it would be sexy if it were in a nice screen like this. Btw has anyone seen the japanese prototype for the Sony Hi-MD digital camera? Its really cute.
8MP is only for pictures that need to be blown up to huge print sizes. Most professional photographers use multiple flash cards for redundancy anyway. They don't use one huge multi GB cards. Imagaine if you were a photographer with GBs of images on the HDD when it decides to fail.
Xmas said:"Handy" is german for mobile phoneMariner said:
Gah! It's all a teutonic conspiracy to confuse me!
(Kind of) back on topic. Although Hard disks are all very well and good in PCs, there is just something in the words "solid state" which makes me prefer flash memory in portable devices. I suppose it's the thought of no moving parts being a good thing, together with the fact that I've had the odd hard disk die on me before.
What's the next big thing in storage then - isn't MRAM on the way?
Mintmaster
Veteran
Re: HD on digicam?
I'm rambling now, but my idea is for this to be a high quality multimedia powerhouse. Think Canon S1 IS + iRiver PMP-120. The uses are endless, and a hard drive has a large role to play in its flexibility. I guess having both a tape and a flash drive could work, but it would have compromises for the other functionality, and mini hard drives are becoming so ubiquitous that it probably won't save much money anyway.
As for 8MP being overkill: hey, we're talking about dream gadgets here! With current tech, I'd probably prefer lower res CCDs for their better sensitivity and lower noise. But let's have some fun
True, but I want still picture capability with the same OIS 10x+ zoom lens. For reviewing/deleting still pics, you'd really want random access. Plus, it can be an MP3/video player and USB drive as well with minimal additional cost. You could even cut out unwanted sections of video as you want, which would allow you to have the camera on more often so that you could catch those unexpected moments. You could even have it run continuously in your car so that when you get in an accident that isn't your fault you'd have proof.ZenBearClaw! said:
I'm rambling now, but my idea is for this to be a high quality multimedia powerhouse. Think Canon S1 IS + iRiver PMP-120. The uses are endless, and a hard drive has a large role to play in its flexibility. I guess having both a tape and a flash drive could work, but it would have compromises for the other functionality, and mini hard drives are becoming so ubiquitous that it probably won't save much money anyway.
As for 8MP being overkill: hey, we're talking about dream gadgets here! With current tech, I'd probably prefer lower res CCDs for their better sensitivity and lower noise. But let's have some fun
I have a Canon D60 and use an "ImageTank". My 1GB CF card can take about 300 6megapixel images at full quality. I can then insert these into an iPod-like device which dumps them to HD and then the card is empty again.
On my last trip to Italy and France, I took over 2,000 6 megapixel photos and stored them all on my portable imagetank.
I would not want a HD in my camera. I'd want a USB2 port and be able to hook it up to an external portable HD.
On my last trip to Italy and France, I took over 2,000 6 megapixel photos and stored them all on my portable imagetank.
I would not want a HD in my camera. I'd want a USB2 port and be able to hook it up to an external portable HD.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I've always wondered if devices like that existed. Cool.DemoCoder said:
Anyway, the best real-time MPEG4 compression I've seen so gives you 40 minutes per GB in best quality mode, and that's 640x480. Recording in 1024x768 or 1280x720 (or even 1920x1080p
) would require a lot more space, though I'm not sure how much (from what I remember when experimenting with compression, the size isn't quite linear with resolution for typical scenes). Anyway, lets consider 720p. It'll probably need around 10 times the space as 640x480 @30fps, as it's twice the framerate and 6 times the pixels. If I wanted to record 2 hours, that would need a good 30GB. Recording 4 min at a time on a 1GB flash card and the transferring is not very practical. Recording to tape is a possibility, but you lose a lot of functionality that is made possible by random access, as I mentioned above. Maybe I don't know enough about storage technology, but I don't see 10-20GB flash cards being particularly affordable anytime soon, even though we witnessed a huge drop recently.
(Hmm, it looks like I shifted into a slightly dreamier mode wishing for 720p recording as opposed to the 1024x768 @ 30fps mentioned originally. Still, I think this is a better goal to shoot for.)
What in particular is so repelling to you about hard drives?