The new SDXC specification for faster, higher-capacity flash cards emerged in January, and Toshiba now promises the cards themselves will begin arriving about a year afterward.
Toshiba plans to sell its first SDXC cards in the spring of 2010, with a starting capacity of 64GB.
(Credit: Toshiba)Toshiba said Monday it expects to be the first to bring SDXC cards to market, with testing samples of a 64GB version shipping in November and the real thing shipping in the spring of 2010. Those dates will be key moments in what doubtless will be a gradual transition away from the prevailing SDHC standard.
SDXC backers promise higher capacities and data transfer speeds for SDXC, which is important for devices such as video cameras that can produce lots of data at a sustained rate. But initially, a new generation of Toshiba's SDHC line will match the SDXC's maximum 60MBps data-reading speed, and maximum 35MBps data-writing speed, the company announced, using a new high-speed interface called UHS104.
The fast new SDHC cards, though, will only be available in 16GB and 32GB models. SDHC tops out at 32GB, but the SDXC specification extends to 2TB. In addition, through use of Microsoft's exFAT files system on SDXC cards, individual files can exceed 4GB, which is important for longer videos.
Capacity is undeniably important when it comes to carrying your video camera around for extended periods of time. But do you really need all that transfer speed? Leaving aside the confusing muddle of minimum vs. maximum transfer speeds and certification, even high-definition video only pushes the envelope so hard.
For example, Canon's high-end 5D Mark II SLR, which can record 1080p video at 30 frames per second, requires only a relatively modest 8MBps write speed for its CompactFlash card; high-end CompactFlash today can handle 45MBps.
Of course, there's also the matter of transferring photos and videos to computers, a tedious task at best that benefits from maximum speed. But that's often constrained, though, by the card reader and its interface to the computer.
No doubt those pipes will widen as time marches on, with SDXC and higher-speed SDHC helping to nudge things along on one end and higher-speed interfaces such as USB 3.0 and Firewire S1600 and S3200 on the other end. The SDXC specification calls for 104MBps speeds in 2009 and eventual speeds of 300MBps.
One interesting issue is whether SDXC will displace CompactFlash in high-end SLRs. SDHC is used in lower-end SLRs now, displacing CompactFlash, and is making its way into higher-end models including Nikon's D300s and Canon's 1D Mark III alongside CompactFlash.
SD and its successors have relegated rivals such as xD card from FujiFilm and Olympus and Memory Stick from Sony to product niches, new MacBook Pro laptops from Apple have built-in SD card slots, and Canon USA technical adviser Chuck Westfall had encouraging words for SDXC.
So SD has plenty of momentum, and the SDXC generation certainly has the potential to continue to outpace CompactFlash in price while also becoming competitive in capacity and data transfer speeds.
The diminutive size of SD compared to CompactFlash is an asset when trying to squeeze a slot into a computer or camera. But some serious and professional photographers have griped that the small cards are hard to handle and easy to lose.
The camera industry and photographers, having just gotten accustomed to the arrival of video in point-and-shoot cameras, just now are beginning to grapple with its arrival in the more serious SLR realm.
Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon's professional products marketing division and a 26-year veteran at the Japanese company, is in the thick of it. Nikon was the first to market with a single-lens reflex camera equipped with video, the D90, but Canon offers video in two SLRs: the high-end EOS 5D Mark II, with a large sensor the size of a full frame of 35mm film, and the Rebel T1i, a more affordable, mainstream model.
Chuck Westfall
(Credit: Canon USA)These cameras combine high-definition video--1900x1080 pixels at 30 frames per second in the case of the 5D Mark II--with SLRs' advantages when shooting in dim conditions and with a broad variety of lenses. But even though today's video SLR features offers hold some appeal to enthusiasts and professionals, they're something of an awkward afterthought. SLRs and those who use them that haven't yet had much time to adapt.
Welcome to the world of digital photography, where change is incessant. In an interview with CNET News, Westfall talked about not just video, but also OLED displays, the arrival of rival full-frame SLRs from Sony and Nikon, changing flash card and file format standards, wireless networking, and more.
Question: The age of the video SLR has begun. A lot of people in the high-end camera market are set in their ways, and video is a radical difference for a lot of them. How does that change the camera design, the marketing, and everything you have to do to sell a camera? ... Read more
LAS VEGAS--Lexar plans to introduce faster, higher-capacity CompactFlash cards using a new generation of the flash memory technology, a company executive said Wednesday.
Lexar's top-end 300X cards will be outpaced by new models shipping later this year.
(Credit: Lexar)Lexar's current top-end 300X-rated CompactFlash cards use a standard called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) to transfer data at 45MB/second, and their capacity tops out at 16GB. But using a new generation of the standard, UDMA 6, Lexar will release cards that have significantly faster transfer speeds and larger capacity, Jeff Cable, director of marketing, said in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.
Cable wouldn't be pinned down on precise details, but he said the new cards' capacity "probably" would be 32GB, and their transfer speeds likely would "pretty close to" UDMA 6's threshold of 100MB/sec, which is more than double that of today's UDMA.
Only newer SLR (single lens reflex) cameras support current UDMA technology, but it's spreading, and there are benefits. For example, cameras can take longer continuous bursts of photos, and photographers can zoom faster to check focus when reviewing shots on the camera LCD. Video, which is arriving in new SLRs, also can saturate data-transfer pathways.
... Read moreEditor's note: From now through the end of December, various Crave experts will be sharing their top five (mostly) tech-related wishes for the holiday season. See what we crave, and maybe you'll get some ideas!
I'll be honest. What I want is Canon's EF 500mm f/4L IS USM telephoto lens, but it costs $5,600, so let's move on to some options that aren't quite so detached from economic reality for a mostly amateur photographer such as myself.
Obviously my camera is a Canon SLR, but I'm reasonably happy with my setup right now, so here are some items I covet that are more modestly priced and that happen to be neutral as regards camera manufacturer.
RawWorkflow.com's WhiBal white-balance card
(Credit: RawWorkflow.com)1. WhiBal white-balance card. I shoot raw images, which means data is taken directly from the camera's image sensor without any in-camera processing. I like it because it gives me more flexibility for matters such as exposure adjustment. Second in importance to exposure, though, is fixing white balance--for example the orangey color cast you'll often see when shooting under incandescent lights or the bluish tinge of pictures in the shade.
The flip side of raw photography is that it's more manual labor than just grabbing the JPEG, but to me it's worth it. I mostly just eyeball the white balance, but sometimes keying off parts of an image--the whites of someone's eyes or gray and black clothing--gives an easier way to set white balance with software. But for more precision, the WhiBal cards from RawWorkflow.com give an easy way to be more rigorous. You take a photo of the durable card, which shows a standard 18 percent gray, then set the white balance in software off that part of the photo. With modern raw-image editing software, you can synchronize the white balance for a series of images off the one you took with the card. The $19 keychain model looks about my speed. ... Read more
Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com has released a proof-of-concept tutorial for Photoshop selection techniques using Configurator. A final version is due soon.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)After a slight delay, Adobe Systems has begun shipping Configurator, an application that lets people create customized Photoshop CS4 control panels and share them with others.
Configurator runs on Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) foundation and lets people use a drag-and-drop interface to produce the control panels. Adobe's Creative Suite 4 applications use Adobe's Flash technology for its control panels, and Configurator is a way to produce those files. The company announced it Tuesday during its Adobe Max conference in San Francisco.
Adobe expects the software to be useful for those who want to customize the sprawling Photoshop interface so only a specific set of features is highlighted--for example those that crime labs use to process forensic images. It also expects that tutorial authors will flock to the technology to produce interactive step-by-step guides, perhaps with videos included.
John Nack, Photoshop's principal product manager, said earlier he hopes the Configurator technology will be brought to other Adobe CS4 applications later. For more details and some sample panels, check out Nack's blog announcement of Configurator.
Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen speaks at the company's CS4 launch event.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Photoshop is a famously taxing piece of software, but beginning with the upcoming CS4 version, it'll be able to employ the muscle of your computer's graphics chip for the first time.
The new version of Adobe's flagship software product takes its first steps in using the graphics processing unit, or GPU, said John Nack, principal product manager for Adobe Photoshop. For example, the graphics chip helps Photoshop CS4 fluidly zoom in and out, rotate the canvas so artists can reorient an image for the best sketching angle, display and manipulate 3D objects, and handle color correction.
"It's not lost on us that when you look at the rate of GPU power advancement, there's an enormous wealth of cycles we can take advantage of now," Nack said. "The rate of price drop and performance gain has been off the charts."
Using graphics chips opens up new horizons, but it poses its challenges. For one thing, graphics chips are designed to blast pixels to the screen, not back to the main processor for further work, so not all tasks can be accelerated, he said. For another, it means Adobe has to work more carefully on hardware compatibility and means some people with older machines might have to upgrade at least the video card; he recommends a card with 128MB of memory.
"Typically, when folks were building a big Photoshop rig...we never had to really concern ourselves with things like which video driver they were using. We had a very light integration. Anything was fine," Nack said. "Now that we're doing actual processing on the GPU, we have to be a good deal more stringent."
... Read more
Olympus' E-3 SLR, with its flip-out screen, will accompany me on my travels.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I'll be on vacation for all of March, so except for a couple posts timed to pop up later, the activity on this blog is going to be awfully light.
I'll be trying out an Olympus E-3, to see if a weatherproof Four Thirds camera really is better for traveling. And for those of you who helped steer my thinking on my plea for help on how best to store photos while traveling, here's what I settled on.
I know I said I wasn't going to lug a PC, but I am after all. I can burn backup disks (and mail them home), winnow out the duds, and surf the Web from cybercafes for our urban moments. And the unglamorous 3-year-old laptop is a sunk cost, unlike lots of CompactFlash cards I don't already own. Thanks to all of you who provided advice.
So who knows--with the camera and the computer, maybe I'll post a gallery of Torres del Paine photos.
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A speed-boosting overhaul of CompactFlash memory technology could start arriving in cameras next year, but it's incompatible with the version used in today's higher-end models
The new version, called CFast, has faster data-transfer speeds that could let photographers take more continuous shots without waiting for the camera to catch up, cut camera makers' costs for built-in buffer memory, and make it swifter to review photos on a camera or copy them to a computer.
This a closeup of the a CFast-era CompactFlash card. Note that it's got a slot instead of pins and that it's got different ridges called keys down the sides to prevent it from being used in today's style of CompactFlash slot.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)"It's going to end up in the high-end cameras. The reason to move to it is purely for speed," said John Santoro, senior product marketing manager for Lexar, a flash card maker and Micron subsidiary. He predicts its arrival in 18 to 24 months. "It's my feeling the camera companies already have this on their road maps and want to start working on prototype samples as soon as the specification is finalized."
But as with many upgrades, the standard will break compatibility with today's technology. That means today's CompactFlash cards won't work in CFast slots, and CFast cards won't work in today's slots.
So the more certain you are that you'll buy a new high-end camera in the next couple years, the more cautious you should be before investing in an expensive collection of shiny new 32GB CompactFlash cards.
CFast spec almost done; prototypes to come
Last year, the CompactFlash Association began work on the new standard, and the specification is in its final stages, said Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association.
"We expect the CFast specification to be published for distribution in the second quarter--hopefully in April or May," said Frank, who showed off CFast prototype cards and slots at the Photo Marketing Association trade show last month in Las Vegas.
Top-end CompactFlash today cards reach 45MB/sec, a speed rating also called 300x (1x is 150KB/sec). CFast, though, uses an interface called Serial ATA that today reaches about 375MB/sec.
In practice, today's cameras can't keep up with those speeds, and flash card readers struggle when transferring images to computers. But faster speeds are useful in cameras, as newer SLRs show: when data can be written to a flash card faster, it's easier to design faster burst-shooting modes into camera that otherwise must rely on more built-in conventional memory.
CFast cards have a different electronic signaling technology that requires a different physical interface, and cards and sockets are shaped differently to prevent people from mixing the older and newer cards. The new socket is tested for 10,000 insertions, just as with current CompactFlash, Frank said.
Camera adoption?
The next question is how CFast will arrive in cameras. CompactFlash today is used in higher-end SLRs from Nikon, Canon, Sony, and Olympus. But camera makers are reluctant to describe particular technology plans, and Nikon didn't even respond to a request for comment.
When I asked Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon USA's professional products marketing division, whether CFast would catch on, he was equivocal. "It remains to be seen. What drives the market is cost and performance issues and availability," he said. Canon's caution, for example, meant it only moved its low-end Rebel SLR line to SD flash memory when the card format was very well established.
Richard Pelkowski, digital SLR product manager for Olympus America, also wouldn't commit, but he did acknowledge the general advantage of CFast. "Greater speed and greater capacity--we certainly realize the benefit of that," he said, adding that card speed not only lets images be written faster, but also lets photographers review them more easily and take advantage of features such as the side-by-side comparison in Olympus' new E-3 SLR.
SanDisk, another top flash card maker, was more circumspect than Lexar.
"At some point, the industry is going to have to transition to some other type of high-performance card," said Jonathan Hubert, SanDisk's director of strategic marketing for flash cards and accessories. CFast is one strong candidate, he said, but then suggested that the SD Card Association isn't resting on hits SDHC laurels.
Frank, perhaps unsurprisingly given his leadership at the CompactFlash Association, was the most bullish of all. He said that Canon and Nikon engineers are participating in the CFast specification development and that the first cards likely will hit the market in the second quarter of this year. "Since this affects the silicon (chips) in cameras, expect no less than a year for cameras to appear using CFast," he said.
Jump-starting the market
If it were up to the camera makers alone, CFast's future would be more uncertain. But there are industrial uses of CompactFlash, too, for computing devices embedded into all manner of things.
CompactFlash is used in routers, defibrillators, Apache attack helicopters, and General Electric locomotives, Frank said. Some slot machines have two--one for holding the operating system and another for logging transactions.
The CompactFlash future in some ways isn't hard to predict. The technology uses the same interfaces as conventional computer hard drives, and it's been following that road map with a few years' time lag.
Today's mainstream CompactFlash cards use an interface called IDE or parallel ATA, and a newer generation just arriving use a speed bump called Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA) that in practice tops out at about 80GB/sec. The CFast version uses Serial ATA technology, which was announced in 2001 and connects hard drives in virtually all PCs today.
Those industrial computing customers, who often don't suffer the power-consumption constraints of camera makers, are eager for the new technology, Frank said--indeed, they were the first to ask for it. Because they're using conventional SATA computer chips, it's not difficult to move to the new technology.
From there, it's a matter of jumping to the camera market, where Lexar focuses. "I think it's inevitable," Santoro said.
I'm going to Latin America for the month of March, and I don't know what to do with my photos. Does anyone out there have any advice they'd like to share?
For the gearheads out there, here are my constraints.
First of all, I'm trying to travel reasonably light--I'll only be backpacking a little, but I will be schlepping luggage a lot, and I don't want to lug a laptop. Second, I probably won't have to go more than two or three days without a wall socket for charging.
Wolverine Data's $370 ESP 5000 has a 120GB drive and can show raw image files.
(Credit: Wolverine Data)I'm guessing I'll need about 100GB of capacity. I'll be shooting raw images with an SLR (single-lens reflex), and there should be some mighty scenic spots. On two weeks in Ireland last year, I shot about 30GB of files, winnowing lightly as I went. So here are my options as I see it.
• Option 1 is a portable hard drive with a flash card reader and display.
I've been trying Wolverine Data's ESP 5000, a 40GB model with a screen. I like its ability to review raw images as well as JPEGs, and its battery power seems sufficient for my needs. And I like these for giving impromptu slideshows.
But I found the user interface clunky, and its raw image quality isn't always enough to check focus quality, even with the latest firmware. A 100GB model costs $370.
Anybody have any experience with the Epson P-5000 or similar products? They're even more expensive--an 80GB version costs nearly $700!
One advantage of these devices is that I could also use them to play video and music files and collect photos from others' digital cameras while I'm traveling.
• Option 2 is a hard drive without the fancy display. Wolverine's 120GB FlashPac costs $140. I'd have to rely on the camera for weeding out the dud shots, which probably is OK, but this is definitely the minimum-thrill approach.
And how reliable are hard drives anyway? My photos are precious, but I can say right now I'm not going to carry a second drive for backup.
• Option 3 is a bunch of CompactFlash cards. I have 16GB so far, but getting up to 100GB would cost something like $400 more even if I didn't pay for premium brands like SanDisk or Lexar. Watching the ever-dropping prices on flash memory cards would be depressing, though.
Flash cards have a lot to recommend them, though: are pretty durable, reliable, lightweight, and don't require batteries.
• Option 4 is whatever options readers are about to tell me about. I welcome your thoughts in the TalkBack section below or by e-mail to stephen.shankland@cnet.com.
Panasonic's 32GB SDHC card, with a 20MB-per-second transfer rate, will cost about $700.
(Credit: Panasonic)Panasonic announced a new SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) flash card on Tuesday that offers both high speed and lots of space for those willing to pay.
The 32-gigabyte card, called the RP-SDV32GU1K, is due to ship in April for about $700. It's a high-speed "class 6" card that can transfer data at speeds of 20MB per second--the world's first at the 32GB capacity, Panasonic asserts.
SD is the dominant format for flash memory, and with the newer SDHC technology that extends capacity beyond 2GB, it's begun spreading into space-gobbling videocameras. SanDisk, a top flash card brand, announced a 32GB SDHC card costing $350 in January, but it transfers data a notch slower, at 15MB per second.
One major flash card alternative to SD, CompactFlash, can transfer data at a maximum of 45MB per second. However, top transfer speeds are often more useful when copying files from a flash card, since cameras and videocameras often can't write data at those top speeds.
