ksz said:
I don't need Sandisk Extreme IIIs when much cheaper high-speed products are available from PQI, Kingston, and others.
FWIW, I was referring to Extreme III's merely to indicate a fast (133x) card of a reputable brand (sorry, but I've never heard of "PQI", nor "Corsair" or "Patriot" which popped up on Pricewatch). Looking at Kingston's website, their 1GB SD 133x cards are currently at the $50/GB price point I mentioned.
Further, the price is low and coming down. The very top end might cost $50 per gigabyte, but even that price will fall.
Which is why I've been saying "no longer will be a big deal to me when price hits X". FWIW, also be aware that I've been effectively "depreciating" my sunk cost in CF cards by using the current prices instead of how much I originally paid for it.
If you're a professional or even an amateur who needs tens of gigabytes of high speed flash memory that is itself weather sealed...
I wasn't even aware that Sandisk's stuff is waterproof: I'm differentiating first on I/O speed, then other factors.
Overall, I thought that my point was really quite simple: just show me an SD card that's 133x or faster, of a clearly reputable brand, that their 1GB card is under $10, or their 2GB card is under $20.
IMO, they're not down to that price point today. Sure,
maybe someday they'll get there, but I don't think that it is going to be anytime soon.
Do recall that retailers were able to get $100/GB for this product this last Holiday season. They would need to maintain their -50%/year rate of price reduction for another 2 years to get high speed cards down to the aforementioned $10/GB price point.
In the meantime, we're likely to see sensor density go up again, which increases how much storage capacity we want.
Perhaps a better way to look at this whole thing is the "Cost per Stored Image", since that's probably more the way that we should be looking at the question of how many/size cards we need to carry: our ultimate product of value isn't 0's/1's, but
retained images.
To this end, if we want a 300 image (assume JPEG+RAW) capacity, then with an 8MP dSLR, we need around 4GB of storage. For the 1GB card that costs $50 and stored 75 images, this works out to be $0.67/image.
Progress occurs. Card prices have come down by 50%, but the new camera is now 12MP, so instead of getting 75/GB, we're now getting 45/GB, so our costs now work out to $25/45 = $0.55/image. So while we are making progress, its really only a 20% effective reduction in costs, rather than what initially looked to be a 50% savings. The "not important" schedule just got pushed further out to the right.
-hh
