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by knweiss 5361 days ago
IMHO it's interesting that they continue to use CF cards in their pro bodies. Some expected the switch to smaller SD/SDHC/SDXC cards.

But I wonder why they decided to announce the 1D X so early? I suppose this will hurt their pro body sales for five months. (The new body will not ship before March 2012.)
3 comments
zstone 5361 days ago
CF, while older, is significantly faster than SD. This is inherent in the number of busses in the design - SD communicates over a few wires, CF over many more, effectively increasing its bandwidth. My guess is that we will see CF until we SATA to mini SSDs or similar; it will take a real revolution in digital storage to dethrone the current king that is CF, SD will never be as fast.

This much leadtime on a prominent release is common, and right now the only camera that the 1D-X is going to cannibalize is the 1DmarkIV, which was already becoming quite scarce _before_ this announcement. Canon Direct lists it as out of stock, same with B&H. Adorama and Amazon seem to have a few each, though. Still, what sales are being hurt here? And mind you, we're talking about a relatively massive investment, you could buy ~10 T3i's for this sticker price, not an investment made lightly or made often - Canon probably doesn't mind waiting a few more months, and if you are in the market for something like this you are paying attention to the rumor mill anyways.

Just think, wouldn't you be pissed if they HADN'T given this much lead time, and you went and tracked down a now-rare 1D-IV, only to see this come out a few months later? I know I'd be quite irate.

Just my 2c...

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sloak 5361 days ago
CF cards allow faster writes and can keep up with higher FPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_memory_cards#Tech...
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eftpotrm 5361 days ago
Which is a real pity. It's not a rugged interface that's designed for repeated loads and unloads but a miniaturisation of PCMCIA. The cards are more crushable than SD, the contacts can bend (happened to me...), the holes can get blocked. None of this is ideal when you need to make a quick card change to get that shot in front of you right now. Whereas SD with rolling ball contacts is about as close to indestructible as any physical interface is likely to get.

I understand why they're still making CF cameras, but I wish the effort were going into either optimising SD or producing a rugged, fast, generic replacement.

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anigbrowl 5361 days ago
why they decided to announce the 1D X so early?

Because they are announcing something that looks likely to be a pro 35mm video camera on November...same day as Red releases Scarlet and Nikon releases...something.

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trafficlight 5361 days ago
Red is finally setting a date for the Scarlet? Very cool.
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bgentry 5361 days ago
Nov 3rd announcement, promised to ship shortly thereafter. Details always available here: http://reduser.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?31-Recon
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