I can understand that higher capacity cards are dropping in price but are the smaller capacity cards dropped similarly?
There are some togs who shoot >2500 shots in a session and of course video shooters (or hybrid) but I would suggest that a significant number of stills users that wouldn't need >128GB cards.
At some point they can't drop much more in price before it's simply not worth the effort to manufacture, package, ship, and market them.
Tech prices seem to follow a "swoop" price curve, where the lowest end model of something is at price X (cheap), one twice as good isn't much more, one twice as good as that isn't much more than the second one...but then you get to a point where suddenly the price grows by leaps and bounds as you move up. There's a "bend" in the price curve where you suddenly start paying a LOT for the "very latest." Wait a few months or maybe a couple of years at the outside, and those very expensive items drop in price, but there are new, even better items past the "bend" in the curve. Meanwhile the stuff that was before the bend hasn't fallen much.
This is why I tend to buy right where that "bend" is (buying the R5 being an exception). Below that, you don't save much money, above that you spend a lot more money, only to see that money "wasted" a few months later when the item you spend so much money on, is now dirt cheap.
[Example: When I bought a TV 15 years ago. Every 5 inches of diagonal size added $100 to the cost...until the jump from 42 to 47 inches, which was $250, with the price difference getting even steeper after that. I bought a 42 inch. And the price of a 42 inch hasn't dropped much since then (there wasn't much room for it to drop), but the 47s (and higher) have dropped a lot.]
When the R5 came out it seemed like all the CF cards out there were on the wrong side of that bend. And so when some people complained that Canon didn't put two CF ports on the camera, I was thinking "who are these people to demand Canon set things up so I have to spend huge money on a card I don't need?" Even if it was the same per GB as the newer SD card, you couldn't get less than a quarter of a terabyte no matter what, so they were STILL more expensive than a 64 GB card which was all I needed.
So I'm glad to see lower capacity CF cards coming out...but honestly unless one is taking a zillion pictures or long videos, a 64GB SD card (of the newer, faster type) is likely more than enough. (And even a hypothetical 1TB SD card (again of the newer standard) might be enough for others.)
Upvote
0