Perhaps the most interesting thing about Red’s recent price list is the range of solid state recording options — CF, ExpressCard, 1.8″ SATA flash, and Red RAM. The Red RAM is basically a Red Drive, but with two of the new 32 GB flash-based drives, instead of two 160 GB mechanical drives. It’s the three other options that are really interesting, though, because they’ll allow people to use generic commodity flash memory, in their choice of formats, for recording. Care will be required — many CF cards, at least, don’t really have enough performance — but this is an amazingly forward-looking move, and further reenforces my earlier point that Red appears to be taking its cues — both in terms of pricing and the openness of the system — from the computer industry rather than traditional camera vendors.

Solid state memory isn’t quite at the prices we’d like to see for our own use, but prices are dropping very fast. We’ll be passing on these options initially, to see how things settle out with the various formats, but if I had to guess to guess I’d say we’ll probably pick up the 1.8″ SATA flash interface (it’s a user-installable part) within 6-8 months of buying the camera. Probably sometime next year we’ll be able to pick up a 64 GB version of this sort of thing at a reasonable price. Recording ~40 minutes of 4K on something smaller than a credit card is pretty amazing. It’s the sort of thing that reminds you that, despite the lack of flying cars, you really are living in the futuristic year of 2007.

It’ll be interesting to see how Panasonic, which currently sells its P2 solid state memory at 5x the price of commodity flash memory, responds to a camera which can actually use commodity flash memory.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 09:53 AM and is filed under Hardware, Red, Storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.