Back To Shoeboxes? Gimme A Break

February 27, 2007

Back in 2004, both Matt Miller and I weighed in, with no shortage of skepticism, on Sandisk's just-announced Shoot & Store campaign. The company's belief, in brief, was that if it was able to hit certain consumer-friendly retail price points with its flash memory cards, folks wouldn't bother dumping the cards' contents (once full) onto hard drives, optical discs or other alternative media for archive. Instead, they'd just toss the full card into a shoebox, or a desk drawer, go out and buy another Shoot & Store card, and proceed to fill it up.

A great way for a flash supplier to goose demand and fill flash memory fabs. Not a great way, however, to solve a consumer problem, I suggested then and I still suggest. Why does Sandisk believe it can successfully swim upstream against an increasingly strong current of hardware, software and systems momentum (spanning computers, cameras and the code that allows them to communicate) that assumes a user will dump his pictures off the pricey semiconductor memory in the camera and onto a common, incredibly inexpensive magnetic media repository? I don't know about you, but my desk drawer contains a miniscule black hole (akin to the one in the clothes dryer that eats socks); I'd never trust my precious photos to it. Not to mention the mind-boggling difficulty of figuring out which of the three dozen memory cards in the palm of my hand contains the particular picture of Aunt Polly (or my precious puppy) that I'm looking for.

The next step in Sandisk's fab-filling mission occurred in January of last year, when it purchased Matrix Semiconductor, a 3-D OTP (one-time programmable) memory manufacturer whose technology I wrote about in a feature article one year earlier. At the time Sandisk announced the acquisition, I remember thinking (but I don't think I publicly shared those thoughts) that this was the perfect memory for Shoot & Store. After all, to that point, Sandisk had been selling over-featured (ie re-writeable) NAND flash memory into the write-once application. And yesterday, as Digital Photography Review reports, Sandisk made my prognostication official.

Sorry, but I still don't buy into the usage model that Sandisk's pitching. What about you, folks? I'm having breakfast with Sandisk at PMA next week and, if they succeed in changing my mind (even a little bit), I'll report back. Until then, I welcome your thoughts.

Posted by Brian Dipert on February 27, 2007 | Comments (5)

August 26, 2011

In response to: Back To Shoeboxes? Gimme A Break
Chuckles commented:

Furrealz? That's marveollusy good to know.

March 5, 2007

In response to: Back To Shoeboxes? Gimme A Break
Ron W. commented:

I agree with Tom H. I'm a "techie" who works with the "real" consumer world. They do not want to learn about all the bunch of ways to transfer and back up their precious pictures, all different from each other. Once on the NAND card, that's where they stay. Also there are a bunch of vendors who are catering to those folks: Printers with LCD viewers and editors with a variety of sockets for the various plug format NAND cards, and now the "best", electronic picture frames, which for the most of them, require the pictures to be on a NAND card. SD is right on the money!

February 28, 2007

In response to: Back To Shoeboxes? Gimme A Break
rod weeks commented:

Bring back the polaroid!

February 28, 2007

In response to: Back To Shoeboxes? Gimme A Break
Rod Weeks commented:

I think a lot of us have a collection of 40 to 80 gig drives in the closet, otherwise doing nothing. I back up onto these every so often. My local ubergeek store is selling mag storage at about $.32 a gig. Not to mention the 100 paks of DVD-R's selling for about $29.00 -or 6.3 CENTS/ gig. Hard to beat either with flash.

February 28, 2007

In response to: Back To Shoeboxes? Gimme A Break
Tom H. commented:

Paul, you sound like an IT administrator. Do you really think the average person follows the same photo backup regimen that you do? Or indeed, anything even close? Welcome to the real world. My father puts the memory card from his digital camera into the card reader I gave him. He accesses the files on the card and views the pictures on screen. Later, he erases the card, often neglecting to copy the files to his hard drive. Then when he can't find the pictures on his computer, he panics and calls me. I give him the bad news that his pictures are lost forever. "But the pictures were on my computer!" he cries. "I saw them on my screen!" So he's losing his latest digital pictures, but meanwhile I'm scanning treasured family photos from the original 4x5 and 2-1/4 negatives he shot with his press camera and Rollei in the 1950s and '60s. Moral: for millions of people, write-once media and a shoebox are hard to beat.

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