At the turn of the millennium, one gigabyte of flash storage could cost anything up to $1100, which means that the 64GB SD-cards recently given to journalists by Panasonic to shoot on their S1H cameras, would have been worth enough money to buy quite a nice car. But that exponential fall in price has a lot of market forces behind it and the film and TV industry is likely to continue benefiting from that. Cameras such as Blackmagic Ursa Mini range rely heavily on very, very fast storage like thisSo really, how long is it likely going to take before we can forego compression entirely? Doubling the linear dimension of a frame multiplies the data by four, and it increasingly normal for even conventional cameras to offer significant amounts of high-speed capability.
Recent figures suggest….