>From: "John A. Lind" <jlind@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>At 01:00 5/20/03, Jan Steinman wrote:
>
>>4-6 years for price-performance parity with MF. I've been tracking -- and
>>predicting -- digital price and performance since my Apple QuickTake in
>>the early 90's, and haven't been off by more than a couple years.
>>
>>Price-performance parity for 35mm is very near, within 18-24 months. 4x5
> >will take until about 2012.
>
>I'm also thinking about technical issues beyond sheer pixel resolution and
>I don't know if you're taking that into account or not. IMO it will
>require breakthroughs in recording technology, and quite possibly storage,
>including its architecture.
Of course, but those technologies are following their own Moore's Law in
parallel. When I used a 320x240 digicam in the early 90's, the computers of the
day had 8 MB of RAM, and a "huge" disk was 1GB! EEPROM -- the basis for modern
camera memory -- was in its infancy, limited to a few tens of kilobytes, and a
few hundred erase-write cycles. Writeable CDs essentially did not exist.
In surviving five decades of technology advancement, which encompasses several
generations of "breakthroughs" of various sorts, Moore's Law has demonstrated
that it compensates for such breakthroughs.
I remember when the pundits were wondering whether we'd ever be able to get
more than 32kB of RAM on a chip, because alpha particles from naturally
occurring radioactivity were "inevitabally" flipping the bits. I guess someone
figured it out... :-)
--
: Jan Steinman -- nature Transography(TM): <http://www.Bytesmiths.com>
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