Rio Carbon MP3 Has A 5G CF To Be Cannibalized

GlucoPilot writes "This guy bought a Rio Carbon Mp3 player because he figured he could rip the 5GB CF Card out of it. He did, and put it in his prosumer 6MP digital camera. Now he can take 1,500 six-megapixel pics in one sitting. Oy." The card is apparently a 5GB Microdrive, note, not 5GB of Flash memory.

Be nice to Rio

[Anonymous Coward]

They've always been nice to us, supporting open standards like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.

Re:Speaking of cameras...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised we haven't seen those microdrives in camcorders yet. I wonder why?

Why? DV tape is so much cheaper, with much bigger capacity.

While a microdrive may be faster, with random access, DV tapes are fast enough for almost all camcorder applications, and far more robust than a microdrive.

5GB Microdrive on eBay: $96

[Anonymous Coward]

If you search completed items on eBay, a 5GB microdrive went for $96 recently. So this guy wasted $150. The days of buying MP3 players and selling them for their parts are over.

Re:Time for a redesign

[mrchaotica]

But I don't get it. Why would they want to redesign it? Won't they sell more the way it is now, since both the people that want to play music and the people who want the hard drive are buying?

Also, there's the other side of it: what if somebody wanted the shell? The thing that upsets me about the iPod Mini is that I want an iPod (to sync with my iBook), but I want a flash-based player. I would have loved to buy an iPod Mini shell off Ebay after somebody else took the hard drive, but NOOOO, Apple had to go screw it up!

How is this not nice?

[k98sven]

Ok.. maybe I'm missing something here.. Are these things sold with a mandatory music-download-service subscription or something like that, in order to subsidize the price of the hardware? Or what?

Because if they make their money off selling the things.. that doesn't make sense. Why should they care what you do with their product once they've sold it? This could leads to them selling more units.

(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)

Are Slashdotters retarded

[be-fan]

Why else would they always put the link in the most useless part of the text? To keep me on my toes? The link does not point to 1,500 six-megapixel pics, so the link text should not be "1,500 six-megapixel pics." The link text should be the "rip the 5GB CF Card out of it."

Re:Be nice to Rio

[MarkByers]

He bought there product and now he is helping advertising it by encouraging others to do the same. That's being pretty nice, I would say.

With the ability to take so many 6MP pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

You think he might have put some larger images on the site so that people could follow along with his mod...

Batteries?

[autopr0n]

What kind of camera can take 1,500 6 mega pixel pictures without a change of batteries? If you can change batteries, you can change media as well.

I've got a Sony DSC-V1, and I love it. But getting a > 256mb memory stick won't do me too much good without extra batteries.

Re:How is this not nice?

[EvilFrog]

Well, ignoring the fact that a corporation is legally a person, businesses do not run themselves. Behind every business there are people making the decisions, and a business is as "nice", "ethical", or "trustworthy" as the people who run it.

The fact of the matter is that there are some companies I prefer supporting over others, because I know what sort of people are behind them.

Re:Speaking of cameras...

[GoRK]

Apple ipod drives are 'dumber' than your normal 1" microdrive or 1.6" mini-drive. They lack a lot of the logic IC's and firmware that allows them to be used with standard IDE interfaces. Instead, the ipod controlls the drive electronics directly. This essentially does a few things: 1) it makes the drives cheaper for apple, 2) it makes refurbishing/upgrading/recycling/repairing faulty iPods a lot cheaper since you dont have to replace the drive's control electronics when you replace the drive, and 3) it makes the drives unusable in anything other than an ipod.

While reason #3 is often cited by conspiracy theorists to be some kind of plot to prevent people from canibalizing drives out of the ipod to prevent potential loss of iTunes revenue, it is really only a side effect of reasona #1 and #2. If running full-fledged drives in the iPod were actually cheaper or the same price as running drives with reduced integrated electronics, rest assured Apple would do it. It's got to be a fairly difficult/expensive/unnecessary engineering process to integrate drive electronics into your design simply to keep people from buying your product to take it apart.

Re:my wish list...

[bwalling]

Sure, they could have internal storage, but you pay for the camera without that, so why should they increase their costs? Sure, they could have a better battery, but then you would buy the $70 secondary battery. Sure, they could improve the optical zoom, but it's cheaper for them to add digital zoom and fool most consumers with it.

They're trying to make money, not help you.

Re:How is this not nice?

[Oliver Defacszio]

all this free advertising goes to, well, the trash

What? After having given Rio roughly two hundred and fifty bucks, I'm ALSO supposed to advertise for them at no charge? I don't think so. It's like the dealership sticker on the back of cars. My buddy used to tell them that either they knock off, say, a thousand bucks off the cost of the car in exchange for advertising, or lose the sticker before the deal closed (properly... no razor blades). Stunningly, he never drove cars with dealership stickers.

Sure, he was being petty, but I completely agree with the point he made. Why would I advertise for Rio or their ilk? It's not as though they've done me any unilateral favours.

Re:How is this not nice?

[Surur]

Its called recognising the second order effects of one's actions. Sure cannibalising the micro-drives are good for you in the short term, but the Seagate makes a big profit margin selling these at a premium to photographers, and probably sells them to Rio at a steep discount. They dont want to lose that premium to the buyers of the Rio unit. They will therefore either stop selling to Rio (to protect their larger profit from photographers) or change the spec in some way to make that unintended use of the drive impossible.

Either way it will drive up the costs for Rio, and damage them as a company. They will be forced to become less hacker friendly, and everyone will end up hating them.

Its called thinking more than one step ahead, and this exact same scenario has already occurred to other HDD music player makers.

Re:How is this not nice?

[loyalsonofrutgers]

That's just not true. Bureaucracies are much more than the sum of the people that combine to form them. This is the "I was just following orders" phenomenon. There's a lot of sociological literature about how bureaucracies and corporations are not merely the culmination of the personalities of its constituent parts. Fact of the matter is that fairly good people, when part of such an organizational structure, can do very bad things. And, furthermore, the organization in this case exists to make money, so fairly good people can do very bad things in order to make money. The organization becomes a creature unto itself.

Re:How is this not nice?

[jhoffoss]

Hello, how is paying the set $250 price for merchandise, then canabilizing YOUR property, not nice? I fail to see the point of this entire thread.

I buy a product from Rio, that's that. If they're selling these at a loss, (which I guarantee you they're not) then they're losing money whether I use it, advertise, etc. or not.

If this were not the case, and they are selling it at a loss to increase sales, as someone suggested, then wouldn't their losses increase due to additional sales? What fruity business consultant would come up with that idea?

Re:Time for a redesign

[HughsOnFirst]

But... aren't CF memory cards anywhere from 3 to 5 times slower?

In a word, No
High end CF memory cards are 2 to 3 times [robgalbraith.com] faster than microdrives. [robgalbraith.com]
Of course they can cost up to fourteen thousand dollars for the really big ones [dpreview.com]