Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterThe Disappearing Desktop
Apr 17, 2009 2:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Smaller camera rigs such as this one from Zacuto—developed for HD video-capable DSLR cameras—point to the trend of new, more compact technology replacing traditional gear.
Is your current computer your last desktop? You might think so if you’ve been reading the pundits lately. The world seems to be thinking small. IT industry research firm Gartner, for example, reports that while demand for laptops and mini-notebooks is still growing, sales of desktop units are falling steeply.
Desktop workstations are a mainstay of video postproduction. But will they continue to get enough mindshare as their market share drops? You might worry when you hear that the world’s largest PC maker, HP, reported in February that while its laptop shipments increased by 8 percent in the latest quarter, desktop shipments declined 15 percent. In January, Apple reported that it sold 25 percent fewer desktops in the quarter that ended Dec. 27 than the year before, even while selling 34 percent more MacBooks. According to Jordan Golson of The Industry Standard, the Mac notebook line (MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro) exceeded 70 percent of Mac sales in this period for the first time ever.
The move to more powerful mobile devices, whether laptops or smartphones, looks like a trend building up speed. Research firm In-Stat predicts smartphones will continue to grow in the market, doubling their market share to about 20 percent of all mobile phones by 2013. According to a recent In-Stat survey, one-third of U.S. cell phone users plan to buy a smartphone next.
Ever-tinier microprocessors enable this push for gear going small. Intel has been regularly shrinking the size of its transistors every couple of years over the last decade. In 2000, the new Pentium 4 used 180-nanometer technology for its circuits. Later this year, the company’s next-generation CPU debuts with the latest 32-nanometer circuitry, yielding a smaller package that delivers more processing power while consuming much less power.
Smaller circuitry is also behind the rapid growth in solid-state disks (SSDs), enabling the flash RAM technology to close in on hard-disk drives in capacity and price. In-Stat expects a compound annual growth rate of more than 100 percent through 2012 for SSDs and flash RAM used for video capture from digital videocameras.
Future SSDs may disappear as standalone products and become part of a system’s core architecture. Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist with In-Stat, says that data I/O performance speeds could be 2X to 4X faster as SSDs drop SATA-style interfaces and become part of a device’s memory hierarchy. Smaller, more advanced imagers and signal-processing technologies such as Canon’s DIGIC chip deliver new capabilities, including full HD capture, to still cameras such as Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II DSLR.
Still cameras that shoot good quality HD—recently joined by Samsung’s Omnia HD cell phone, which shoots 720p video—further point up the trend toward smaller, price-competitive gear that can do a wider variety of tasks.
At the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference in February, Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces research group demonstrated an inexpensive, wearable computing system—built around a webcam, a battery-powered 3M projector, and an Internet-enabled mobile phone—that turns just about any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can call up data from the Internet or interact with projected images using the prototype, dubbed SixthSense.
Ready or not—Maes sees the technology as creating a new digital sixth sense—imagers, computers, and the Internet will increasingly become parts of our day-to-day lives.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.