All,

A company who produces memory cards for cameras including HD consumer cameras (Product description) is selling 64 GB memory card replacement for a hard drive. (Product description)

Sandisk & Sony have developed a 2 TB (2,199,023,255,552 Bytes) or 2⁴¹ =2,000 GB = 2,000,000 MB memory. When the price is right, this will spell the end of the Hard Drive. 2TB is about 9 full days and 13 hours of 1080P MPEG4 program.

Blu-ray is a 25 GB/layer disk. So provided the manufacturing and duplication costs are right the Blu-ray will disappear. This is because lasers and mechanical movements will not be required by the consumer.

Sony also owns Columbia Pictures.

AlanH

Whilst memory prices are plummeting, I hate to see the cost of a 64Gb Memory Card.

It will be quite some time before this technology replaces discs, IMHO.

Hilarious.

With all the effort, money and marketing put into Blu-ray - not to mention its growing popularity and silver-disc sex appeal - do you really believe some solid-state format will come and replace it just because it happens to have better specs?

This reminds me of all those claims that 1080p's days are numbered, and that 4K formats for the home are just around the corner - completely forgetting the limitations of filmstocks, post-production processes and market patterns.

Edited January 31, 200917 yr by Haggis2

With all the effort, money and marketing put into HD DVD - not to mention its growing popularity and silver-disc sex appeal - do you really believe some new sony format will come and replace it just because it happens to have better specs?

Hasn't this already been raised and fully discussed in another thread?

Many times this has been raised, and it ain't gunna happen for some time..

Yeah, sorry the cost effectiveness of pressing a disc will NEVER EVER be surpassed by memory manufacture costs.

Yeah hasn't the read speeds of these memory cards been questioned? Are they able to play HD video/audio at resonable rates?

Ralfi,

Sony use them for their HD handicam

AlanH

lol can you see yourself walking into a video shop to rent a movie on one of this cards so I assume you plug it into your display assuming they come up with ONE standard format right and pigs will fly the pink type Sony v Toshiba all over again

cheers laurie

link for this thread

sh!t,

Reported

Alanh, you're a bit late mate with this one,it has already been discussed.

Anyhow just a few words ............the maximum bit rate for Blu-ray is approx. 6.75 mBytes/sec, these cards can easily dump that without a sweat. Ihave already tested a small segment of HD DVD video ( Planet Earth ) on a 4 gig HP USB pen drive and the results were perfect, I did this across the layer change of the disc and there was not a glitch or a pause in the video stream whatsoever. Also there was no bank switching (memory layer switching) observed at all.

So as long as the read rate of the card is sufficently high to meet the demands of the video stream then there is absolutely no reason why any memory based card or pen drive for that matter can be used.

The practical issue lies with the write speed of the card, multiple layered cards have slower controllers which bottleneck write speeds whereas Single Layer Architecture cards ( SLA) are very fast, making them more expensive.

My opinion is that these cards will be used more for movie rentals rather than for permanent movie storage, the BR optical disc is significantly cheaper to produce than a solid state laticework of billions of transistors to do the same.

When one considers the number of junk movies that are consigned to plastic these days it is a much better proposition that these might be erased from a card rather than have them monopolize the land fill.

Blu-ray optical disc would stand for something if only the better quality movies made it through to the final pressing rather than have consumers wade through the endless collections of optical media as we have with DVD today.

So this is where I think solid state card technology will find it's place, in rapid portable downloads.....not as a permanent storage medium for movies.....it is too useful and convenient for that. Holographic discs will eventually replace hard drives and Blu-ray for multi-movie storage but that's about 5 - 10 years away so blu-ray still has some breathing space.

C.M

For now, I'd trust optical disk technology over flash memory any time. While the shelf life of optical disks may not be as long as you'd hope, it surely beats the gone-in-a flash cards.

On the other hand, if the movie studios would allow me to dump content on to a home media server...

It seems to me that Bluray is probably the last optical medium.

Bluray will still run it's course, but I can't see there being a Super Bluray or whatever...

For now, I'd trust optical disk technology over flash memory any time. While the shelf life of optical disks may not be as long as you'd hope, it surely beats the gone-in-a flash cards.

On the other hand, if the movie studios would allow me to dump content on to a home media server...

Thats what digital copies are for.

Chicken Man,

Thanks for the only serious response.

If every PVR contained a 2 TByte drive, then the more likely delivery system may be to deliver the movies electronically though the net or broadcast. Alternatively you will go to the video shop where they mave many 2 TB drives and you download the movies onto a larger thumb drive.

Since the plastic used in disks is derived from crude oil, you may find the cost of the blanks for Blu-ray will increase, but the cost of memory which is essentially coming from sand will decrease particularly when it is recycleable (by the writing of new data). This is far less polluting that pressing disks on the basis of what you expect to sell of a particular movie.

As afar as this topic being raised before, Memory chips have not been this huge before. After all 2TB is 80 single layed Blu-ray disks.

AlanH

Chicken Man,

Thanks for the only serious response.

If every PVR contained a 2 TByte drive, then the more likely delivery system may be to deliver the movies electronically though the net or broadcast. Alternatively you will go to the video shop where they mave many 2 TB drives and you download the movies onto a larger thumb drive.

Since the plastic used in disks is derived from crude oil, you may find the cost of the blanks for Blu-ray will increase, but the cost of memory which is essentially coming from sand will decrease particularly when it is recycleable (by the writing of new data). This is far less polluting that pressing disks on the basis of what you expect to sell of a particular movie.

As afar as this topic being raised before, Memory chips have not been this huge before. After all 2TB is 80 single layed Blu-ray disks.

AlanH

Alan there's no doubt in my mind that eventually some other distribution method will replace optical discs but when that will happen is an open question... it's not if... it's when...

I think you have to remember that movies are produced, marketed and distributed by a juggernaut of vested interests all making money in the entire process... the players in that distribution channel will change... that's a surety... it doesn't really matter how the movies get to us... as long as the money flows.......

nice work raymond

Yeah hasn't the read speeds of these memory cards been questioned? Are they able to play HD video/audio at resonable rates?

Yes

I mean yes its been questioned ..especialy its ability to record 24fps

Ralfi,

Sony use them for their HD handicam

AlanH

Using them and using them effectively are two different things Alan

As far as I know, and Ive spoken to a lad who is into movie making ..he tells me the transfer rate of SD cards in particular struggle to peform at recording in 24fps...in that it has the potential to stutter as the card gets hotter and result in a subtle stutter during playback typically after about 15 minutes or so of recording. He advises to let the card and camera cool after about 15 minutes and then keep shooting for best results

maybe one day

but not today thanks

Since the plastic used in disks is derived from crude oil, you may find the cost of the blanks for Blu-ray will increase, but the cost of memory which is essentially coming from sand will decrease particularly when it is recycleable (by the writing of new data).

Unfortunately the appropriate quality of sand isn't that common....

Infact there's a serious shortage of high grade industrial silicon for all purposes at the moment due to demand for silicon from solar panel manufactures!

Unfortunately the appropriate quality of sand isn't that common....

Infact there's a serious shortage of high grade industrial silicon for all purposes at the moment due to demand for silicon from solar panel manufactures!

I thought that was Rare Earths the Chinese has the monopoly and now has limited exports out of china

http://www.lynascorp.com/applicationList.a...1&page_id=7

cheers laurie

The other question to ask is..... WHY?

Blu-ray has more than enough space for very high bit-rate, Full 1080p video and uncompressed audio, plus all the extras needed.

It has provision for extra colour bandwidth too, but we'll never see that get utilised - as the studios know they can't sell something you can't see!

99% of films - despite what many claim - simply do NOT have the definition in the source material to go beyond 1080p.... End of story.

(Exceptions being IMAX, Vistavision and 70mm - Please, let's not re-open that old debate about the "rez" of 35mm!)

The uncompressed audio found on most Blu-ray is also as good as it gets.

So what great benefit is there in replacing it with a higher storage medium?

The only worthwhile improvement that I can think of is (even) higher bit-rate video with 4:2:2 chroma sampling, rather than 4:2:0. But again - that will just not happen.

Also consider Profile 2.0, 24p playback (finally!), the ability to handle future films that may (repeat: may) be shot at 60p, and even higher bitrate soundtracks than the studios are currently producing, not to mention the backward-compatability with DVD, and you start to realise that Blu-ray's looking pretty "ultimate".

So why bother?

Edited January 31, 200917 yr by Haggis2

Most products are driven not by avaialble technology and ease for consumer, but marketing and accounting. While they can make $ out of optical disc the studios and CE manufacturers will let that run its course then as revenue slows they will have the next thing waiting to take its place. They won't jump the gun and ruin their own market. Gee we drive cars that run on fossilised remains and have explosions going off in the engine still

In my mind, anything after Blu-ray, will need to be much cheaper than what we're paying now for BDs.

Call me naive, but the PQ/AQ of Blu-rays can't get MUCH better in the near future at least, so we'll likely see less of a gap in these departments between BD & the next medium as we're seeing now between DVD & BD.

So then I don't think the consumer will have as much of a desire to once again, upgrade their whole movie collection, unless prices drop dramatically (& I mean less than half of current BDs, possibly even a quarter of the price).