Megapixels need megastorage

In April 1998, several Japanese electronics firms converged to develop a new high-volume, low-cost storage device to compete with Toshiba’s popular DVD. The group, which eventually labeled itself the Advanced Storage Technical Conference, or ASTC, consisted of Imation, Olym-pus, Sharp, Sony, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Philips and Sanyo. The group designed a new magneto-optical media format, called AS-MO, that could store six to seven gigabytes of data on a 120-mm CD-ROM-sized disc.

Though AS-MO now appears unlikely to eclipse DVD, Sanyo saw the new format as a boon to super-megapixel digital cameras its partners were, even then, designing. According to a March 20 Forbes report, Sanyo currently holds at least a 40% share of a $3 billion digital camera market that is growing at a rate of 60 percent a year. Though its own digital cameras are popular only in Japan, Sanyo secured its market share by manufacturing digital cameras for Olympus, Nikon, and numerous other big-name camera brands. It also has a longstanding CCD-manufacturing partnership with Philips.

Using the technical foundations of the AS-MO discs, and seizing the opportunity its market position afforded, Sanyo came up with a smaller 50-mm version of the AS-MO aimed squarely at the digital camera market.

Working with partners Olympus and Hitachi Maxell, Sanyo developed the device, dubbing it the "iD Photo" disk. The "I" in iD stands for "intelligent" and "image." Matchbook-sized, it is only eight millimeters wider than the CompactFlash disks popular in the current generation of digital still cameras. But that’s where the similarity ends.

Though Type II CompactFlash (CF) cards currently range up to 256MB, few digital cameras have the internal processing capability to actually access that much storage space. And write-times are extremely slow on CF cards, topping out at 3.5MB a second.

A Digital Jazz Age

Sanyo is already at work on the second- and third-generation iD Photo drives, which promise to store up to 3.5 gigabytes of data by the end of the year 2002. But even with the performance delivered by the iD Photo disks coming to market in a few months, the possibilities are stunning.

In its first released version, the iD Photo disc will store 730 megabytes, at a cost of $20 per disk. That’s more than double the current market leader IBM Microdrive’s 340MB capacity, at less than a twentieth of the cost. The iD Photo disk will store up to 1800 2-megapixel (400K) images, and capture images at a rate of 20MB a sec. That means that for the first time, it will be possible to capture a rapid-fire sequence at 2-megapixel resolution on a mid-range digital camera.

While Sanyo will be first to market with the new disks, and cameras that use them, Sony and Sharp have partnered to produce a 1-gigabyte, 50-mm form-factor magneto optical drive for digital cameras, due out in early 2001. Sony is likely to deploy the new disks in audio players as well. That may be the key to the magneto-optical devices becoming more accepted in digital cameras, says digital imaging industry consultant Fred Shippey.

"It’s tough to drive these innovations in just a limited part of the market. To be successful, it has to be able to be widely accepted and usable in a wide varity of devices. Cell phones, Palm Pilots as well as digital cameras. If you aim at a narrow market it will be hard to make it go."

One key attraction of the new magneto-optical disks is their archival longevity. Unlike solid-state media such as CompactFlash and SmartMedia, AS-MO disks use both magnetic field fluctuations and laser heat to write data onto their .6-mm-thick disks. The disks, which are encased in a dust-proof cartridge, can be rewritten more than 1 million times, and data can be stored safely on them for 100 years. With their high capacity and durability, they can become both the live action and archival storage replacement for film.

If a new generation of CCDs can deliver the data fast enough, an iD Photo-equipped digital camera will be able to capture up to 50 frames per second at 2-megapixels resolution. Videographers will recognize thats almost twice the standard 30-frames-per-second rate of analog and digital video cameras.

As digital camera CCDs quickly approach the 6-megapixel range, the industry is at a new threshold, says Shippey, "like the 20s and 30s, when jazz was looked on as the devil’s music. You had no sense of what was going to happen.