Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 62) STORAGE MEDIA BY LARRY LUECK SOLID-STATE CAMS: THE FUTURE FOR HDV INITIAL SUSPICIONS ABOUT FLASH MEMORY ARE NOW DISTANT MEMORIES. that time in consumer applications was notoriously slow by professional standards, and this too concerned us. However, we need not have worried; the P2 cartridges used four very special SD-format cards arranged in a RAID fashion that increased writing speeds to professional levels. The years that have passed have demonstrated again and again that the P2 cartridge is very reliable, can be handled roughly without damage, works in temperatures as low as -40ºC and as high as +80ºC, has sufficient capacity to be practical for broadcastlevel news-gathering applications, and is well-suited for HDV. It is true that P2 cartridges are still very costly, but we need to remember that they contain very special “SD” type cards designed and made specifically for this application. They cannot be compared directly with conventional SD and SDHC cards. The P2 cartridges also have writing speeds as fast as 640Mbps, far above conventional flash-memory media, where “fast” usually means 100Mbps or thereabouts. These unique characteristics may explain why we hear of user complaints that it is difficult at times to secure the P2 media they need, especially in an emergency. Demand is high, the media are special, breadth of distribution is still somewhat limited, and there is only one brand to choose from. The general demand for flash-memory NAND chips is also very high, and the prime manufacturers of these chips sometimes have difficulty meeting these demands in a timely fashion. A fire at one of Samsung’s fabrication plants last August threatened to create a shortage, but the line was soon running again. As solid-state camcorders become more popular, any supply problems that exist today should disappear. Based in South Korea, Samsung is the www.dv.com I n 2003, when Panasonic introduced the P2 professional camcorder, the first to use solid-state (flash-memory) cartridges, there were a lot of people in the industry, this writer included, who were more than a little skeptical of its likely acceptance. Although the camcorder itself was not unusually expensive, the flash-media cartridges that served as the recording media were, and we all wondered if anyone would be willing to pay such a high price for media, with four or five such cartridges adding up to the price of a high-quality, tape-based, prosumer camcorder. Well, we all know now that our skepticism was unfounded. The P2 format has not only survived, but grown steadily, with HDV versions now priced as low as dv january 2008 $5,000. The cartridges, while still comparatively expensive, are much less so on a “dollars-per-gigabyte” basis, and are now available in capacities as high as 32GB (at an MSRP of $1,650). In fact, the format has become so popular that many users now complain that they have difficulty satisfying their need for cartridges. One of our concerns, when the first P2 products were introduced, involved the stability and reliability of the flashmemory media. At that time, flash-memory cards were just gaining broad use in a variety of consumer applications. While there was no reason to doubt the reliability of flash memory for consumer applications, these media had no history in the professional video recording field, and that alone created doubt. Also, the write speed of the flash-memory cards used at 62 http://www.dv.com
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