At 09:12 AM 6/30/2003 -0700, Jan Steinman wrote:
>From: "Richard F. Man" <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>Even Moore's law has a
>limit on how FAST the data gets transferred between the CCD and the write
>medium :-), let along the storage etc.
Actually, no.
Historically, Moore's Law is shown to apply to systems as well as
components. Moore's Law applies to all components in parallel, thus also
applies to the aggregate. Otherwise, we'd all be using 2 GHz
microprocessor chips with 40MB hard drives and 100 kB/S system busses. :-)
But of course, it is true that the flash cards you own today won't get
faster by plugging them into a faster camera, but who's going to want a
"puny" 512 MB Compact Flash card when cameras have take 32 MP images, and
the sweet spot on the capacity/price curve is at 6 GB? :-)
Do you write just to be "right?" First of all, my point is that lets not
get fixated on 32MP sensor or whatever, when 6MP is plenty good enough for
most mortals. This isn't exactly like "640K bytes is all you ever need."
Second, while Moore's law applies to systems, in the context of a camera
systems, writing each image out is the bottom neck. This is not a general
purpose computer where the system does gazillion things from checking mouse
movement to writing data to RAM buffer, this is a specialized system where
an image gets "exposed" on the sensor, some processing occur and it needs
to be written to FLASH / Hard Drive as fast as possible so the sequence can
be repeated. Everything is a tradeoff, your 6 GB hard drive may not be as
reliable as a 512MB FLASH card. etc.
// richard <http://www.imagecraft.com>
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