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Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips Latitude D520 battery.

Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.

In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a matter of time. “Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year,” he said. “Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years.” Samsung makes both SSDs and HDDs.

Beard explained why a cost gap persists between solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. “The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables,” he said. “To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn’t really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive.” (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the Latitude D600 battery market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)

“When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive,” according to Beard. “But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case, he said. So, the cost will double as you double the capacity, according to Beard.

This argument, however, works in favor of lower solid-state drive pricing too–as flash memory prices drop and densities and capacities increase. And Beard added that “there’s a lot of pressure for OEMs (PC makers) to match the price to the traditional pricing in the hard-drive industry.” Samsung is also a PC maker and faces the same pressures.

And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? “The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash  market,” he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can’t make money.

“Every major flash manufacturer posted major losses in Q4. So flash and SSD manufacturers are under a lot of pressure to make a profit,” Beard said Latitude D610 battery.

Where is the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot for solid-state drives going to be later this year? “On the business side, the sweet spot is 64(GB) moving to 128. On the consumer side it’s definitely 128 moving to 256,” he said.

Samsung SSDs with a capacity of 256GB have been shipping since January. Dell offers these drives in some laptop models already. 256GB drives are just now “rolling out into mass production,” Beard said. “We’ll start shipping it to some of our smaller customers about right now.”

A U.S. trade court has agreed to look into Samsung’s claims that Japanese rival Sharp had infringed its patents relating to LCD (liquid crystal display) laptop battery technology.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) said in a statement on its Web site that it has “voted to institute an investigation” into Samsung’s complaint of patent infringement by Sharp, filed Dec. 1.

The Korean company’s allegations, according to the statement, are made against Sharp Corporation of Japan and two of its American subsidiaries.

Legal disputes between Samsung, the global market leader in LCD TVs, and fourth-ranked Sharp are not new, according to Reuters. The news agency reported Thursday that the Japanese vendor earlier this month won an LCD patent lawsuit against Samsung in the Netherlands Latitude D410 battery.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered Samsung’s Dutch subsidiary to freeze imports and sales of its LCD panels and LCD TVs that tap the disputed technology. Samsung was also instructed to remove the products from store shelves.

The U.S. ITC, Reuters added, also ruled in favor of Sharp in mid-November, ordering Samsung to stop selling in the United States products that infringe Sharp’s patents. In addition, the pair have ongoing LCD patent-related legal tussles in Japan, Germany and other parts of the United States, according to the report.

Both Samsung and Sharp are also embroiled in a legal suit brought on last month by Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia, which has accused several LCD vendors of conspiring to inflate prices of displays Latitude D420 battery.

LAS VEGAS — Kodak’s slick new Slice camera is half-camera, half-photo album, and all about enabling easy sorting and uploads to sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Kodak Gallery, and YouTube.

In addition to 2GB of internal storage, the 14-megapixel camera has a 3.5-inch touchscreen that looks sharp during image playback. You can also tag images of people with their names via an onscreen keyboard, then sort all the images on the device by name. The camera also has a search function for locating images of specific people (just as long as you’ve already tagged them).

Although it doesn’t have built-in wireless connectivity, the Slice does have other sharing-friendly features that are accessed using the camera’s onscreen Share button. You can tag images and video for upload to popular sites while they’re still on the camera, and plugging the camera into a USB port uploads your content without needing to do much work on the computer end of the equation.

Along with the 2GB of onboard memory, which the company says holds up to 5000 shots, the Slice offers a MicroSD card slot for expanding its storage capacity. The optically stabilized 5X zoom lens ranges from 31.5mm on the wide-angle end to 157.7mm telephoto, and the camera also shoots 720p HD video.

The Kodak Slice is slated for availability in the spring at $350, in black, silver, and the vegetarian-friendly radish pink.

Sub-$200 EasyShare Cameras Include a Pocket Megazoom
A group of new sub-$200 Kodak EasyShare cams also offer some of the sharing features of the Slice, letting you designate photos for upload to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Kodak Gallery. All of the new M series cameras are due in the spring.

The 14-megapixel Kodak EasyShare M580 is an intriguing $200 pocket megazoom, offering an 8X optical zoom lens (28mm to 224mm). The 5X optical zoom (28mm to 140mm), 14-megapixel Kodak M575 will sell for $180.

Kodak also announced two 12-megapixel compact cameras: the 5X optical zoom EasyShare M550 ($150), and the 3X optical zoom EasyShare M30, which will cost $130.