Digital Focus: Advanced Red-Eye Removal Tips

Dave's Favorites: Hitachi's 4GB Camera Memory

Do you ever think your camera doesn't have enough memory to keep up with your vacation schedule? Would 4 gigabytes of storage on a single card help solve that problem? Hitachi has announced just that: a variation of the IBM Microdrive with as much storage space as my PC's hard disk had in 1997. (Hitachi is in the process of acquiring all of IBM's hard drive manufacturing and sales.)

Microdrives are miniature hard disks that fit in a typical CompactFlash memory card slot. Currently, IBM sells 340MB and 1GB versions. Unfortunately, the new Microdrive won't be available until the fall, so I haven't had a chance to play with one of these myself yet ... but I can hardly wait!

According to a Hitachi spokesperson, the new drive features a read-write head that is half the size of the one in IBM's 1GB Microdrive. The tolerances for this gadget are almost unbelievably small. When you consider the scale of the components--the read/write head is about the size of a grain of salt--it's analogous to a Boeing 747 airplane flying 1 millimeter above the surface of the earth.

The 4GB Microdrive will be CompactFlash Type II-compliant, which means that most digital cameras with CompactFlash slots should be able to use this new drive. How many pictures can you store on one of them? Think of it this way: You could set your 6-megapixel camera to TIFF mode--so it stores images without the losses induced by JPEG--and take more than 300 images without changing cards or downloading your pictures. In JPEG mode, you could probably go on a round-the-world vacation with just one card.

You can be sure I'll be waiting for Hitachi's Microdrive with bated breath. Unfortunately, I suspect the price tag--as yet unannounced--may keep anyone without deep pockets away for quite some time to come.