Showing posts with label Toshiba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toshiba. Show all posts

Aug 28, 2015

Flash Drives Getting Smaller

The NAND (not and) flash technology that Toshiba introduced in 1989 (130nm or nanometers), making thumb drives, SSDs, (solid state drive) and smartphone memory, has finally reached a development dead end. Toshiba and other major manufacturers of 15 nm NAND flash are stopping new development and focusing development on 3D NAND.

For comparison, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nm in diameter, and there are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. 1 centimeter = 10,000,000 nanometers.

Intel says it will be able to fit 1TB (terabytes) on a card just two millimeters thick in an object half the size of a postage stamp.

A square inch drive with a Terabyte of capacity can contain more bits than the Milky Way has stars (about 200 billion to 400 billion stars as estimated by astronomers). Obviously, when it comes to computers, size matters and smaller is better. Incidentally, My blog spoke of terabytes in 2010 LINK

May 1, 2012

New 4K TV Coming

Television manufacturers are always eager to shore up their business with new technology and are gearing up to roll out sets with what's known as 4K screen resolution. These TVs, which should start to hit store shelves in the United States later this year, have about four times the resolution of 1080p screens, the current standard for high-definition sets.

Regardless of the size of its screen, a 1080p TV has about 2 million pixels arrayed across 1,920 vertical columns and 1,080 horizontal rows. Although electronics manufacturers haven't yet settled on a standard, 4K resolutions generally have at least 7 million pixels - and sometimes many more - arranged across about 4,000 columns and 2,000 rows. All those extra pixels allow 4K televisions to display images in much finer detail than HDTVs.

On bigger screen sizes at close distances, the difference between 1080p and 4K is stunning. At a close viewing range, HD video on a big screen can look pixilated, and colors and images can blur into the background. By contrast, 4K video looks super sharp and almost lifelike. At a further distance the difference tends to be less noticeable.

You might want to wait for 4K. The first 4K TVs will likely be outrageously expensive. Toshiba's 55-inch 4K television is already available in Japan for $10,000 or so. Another reason to wait is that no shows are being produced in 4K yet. In fact very few are produced in 3D so far, but ESPN is betting that many will love the 3D sports events it will be producing.

The 4K video processor should only add about $10 to the cost of a TV, but the big cost issue is the display technology. The ability to cram that many pixels into a relatively small space is on the cutting edge of display manufacturers' capabilities.

Manufacturers will only sell about 5,000 4K TVs this year worldwide and won't sell more than a million per year until 2015. 3D TV should be selling more units by then, also.