The Shape of Things to Come

PMA is going on right now and some products have been announced. Nothing earth-shattering, but Sony is showing a non-functioning prototype of a compact, non-SLR, interchangeable lens camera in the vein of Panasonic's GF1. More interesting to me is the CompactFlash Association, who knew there was one, has announced that the newest Compact Flash Cards will have the astounding capacity of 144 petabytes. For those like me who never heard of such a thing, a petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which is a thousand gigabytes, which is a thousand megabytes, etc. To go along with this, DALSA, which makes imaging sensors for high-end medium format digital backs and other more scientifically intended equipment, has debuted a 196-megapixel imaging sensor. For now, this will only be used in aerial photography cameras, but still, you know that sooner or later those sensors will show up in medium format backs and that will push Canon, Nikon, and Sony to even higher levels of performance which will mean bigger and bigger hard drives and faster and faster processors for our computing needs. Fasten your seat belts, the ride is going to get bumpy.