Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group Blog

The age of solid state storage memory is arriving. A 64 GB NAND drive in a MacBook AIR costs $900. Mass production of high capacity NAND drives is only now beginning, though, so their price is at a premium.

I paid $2000 for a 2GB Barracuda drive in 1994. Nowadays, cutting edge drives cost 50¢ per GB (Terabyte and up) and older generation drives cost 35¢ a GB.

Watch for rapid price drops and capacity bumps in NAND drives over the coming months (and more over the years).

But, one of the most exciting things in these drives is speed bumps. A partnership between Intel and Micron Technologies is claiming achieving read speeds of 200 MB/Sec and write speeds of 100 MB/Sec for upcoming NAND Drives. We’re looking at a real speed bump in the near future in transfer rates.

Check out the news here

Gates, Simonyi Give $30 Million To Build Giant Telescope

The viewing equipment will include a 3,200-megapixel digital camera that will capture and download up to 30 Tbytes of image data per night.

Full Story…

First of all – my thanks to Lee and Mark for setting up this space to knock around ideas and hopefully generate a bit of interest in some of the stuff that might otherwise escape our notice in the blur of activity we’re involved in every day. Hopefully I’ll be able to avoid inane posts referring the recent release of Photospray or any further mention of Photoshop Your Pooch.

So let me just dive with the first thing that grabbed my attention today.  Microsoft has released their gold master version of the HD Photo plugin for Photoshop. Bill Crow is the chap at Microsoft heading up the project and over at his blog he has a profusion of information on the format and its requisite usage of a new color space they had to come up with. If you go here you can find all the dirt on what they (the boys and girls at Redmond)  expect of this new file format. Much of the stuff on these sites is pretty dang geeky even for me so just scoot past all the gamma displays, pixel count arrays and get the plugin and see what you think about it.  I don’t shoot a whole lot of HDR – images that have high dynamic range and therefore need multiple exposures to blend together, compensating for the limits of the capturing sensor’s range. However, just to satisfy my curiosity, I’ll be fooling around with this in the next few days and I’ll post my findings here.  Maybe some of  you can also. I’d certainly be interested.  -je