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P2 pricing
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I’ve taken a very good look at RED. I’m a reservation holder.
And I can say I’m not too interested in recording my footage to a hard disk, and especially to a RAID. Sure it’s big, and (comparatively) cheap. And if that’s the way you want to go, it’s an option they’re making available. But I certainly don’t plan on using that. I’m much more interested in the REDFLASH options.
And while we’re on the subject — did you notice the price on RED’s own RED RAM recording module? 64GB for $4500. Or, about 25% more than four 16GB P2 cards. As more solid-state options come on the market, natural competition will drive prices to where they need to be and should be.
And hard disks? Hard disks are a temporary band-aid of a recording solution, only really offered because of the great price-to-gigabyte ratio. But they’re noisy, power-hungry, temperature/heat/humidity sensitive, and fragile. They’ve got a place, but only as an interim solution until solid state memory gets large enough and affordable enough. Every major manufacturer is offering solid-state (Panasonic, Thomson/Grass Valley, Ikegami, Red, and now even Sony is offering solid-state memory recording).
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Jan,
I didn’t know that P2 cards were made by hand – wouldn’t robotic construction provide for more consistency and accuracy? Especially in the areas of soldering, component placement, etc.?
The multiple check points for QC are laudable and I’m sure necessary for the MTBF Panasonic is shooting for… but I was always told that the robitic assembly lines were the way to create consistency and high quality.
Just trying to understand the rational behind the process (one that obviously works extremely well.)
Thanks for all that you do here on the COW and elsewhere.
Stan Timek
Pollywog Theater
http://www.pollywogtheater.com— check out —
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The P2 pricing is exactly why I never invested in the P2 workflow, I chose the Firestore. I have been completely happy with the FS-100 performance and reliability since I first bought the HVX-200, and won’t (and don’t need to) look back. (Unless, of course, the P2 cards reach 64 GB capacity each and sell for around $500.00!)
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[HarryD] “Jan, sorry if I tweaked you with that comment. You may not realize it, but we know each other face-to-face and I have used and like Panasonic cameras for all my long career. “
I do know who you are Harry, as I recall I trained you on the AG-A800 SVHS Edit system you had in your office, oh so many years ago.
[HarryD] “I am now invested in P2. So, it concerns me about P2 obsolescence. “
There is no obsolescence. It is a connector to us. That would be like saying that we are no longer going to have RCA connectors. Or if you were Sony, that they were not going to make any XDCAM disc players, or us not making any DVCPRO studio machines. Silly right? The PCMCIA form factor was convenient for several reasons. The size is perfect for the Memory Chips and the LSI controller.
[HarryD] “And thanks for the info on the manufacturing process. It’s enlightening. I was only saying that as a given technology matures, the prices usually drop dramatically. We’ve only seen this with P2 very recently, I suspect in reaction to other things appearing in the market, not the manufacturing become more efficient. “
This statement too is about as wrong as it could be. The 8GB card when it was introduced was $2200 as was the 4GB card at its introduction. The 2GB card was around $1800. All of them have fallen in price over the last 4 years. We just dicsontinued the 4 GB card and on its way out the door it was at $550. As far as the competition, what competition? There are other manufacturers that say that they will have something to compete, but when? And do they have the reliability of P2? Frankly the reason the price came down is because we could offer the decrease.
It is one thing to manage the memory portion of the recording process and another to have outside manufacturers make your memory modules for you. As a matter of personal feeling I do not look forward to the Hoodman Memory card. It puts a unknown into the chain of what I know to be a fast and extremely reliable system. I know what a P2 card does, I do not know what a Hoodman card does. So competitively, to get back to that point, what they have to show the world is that they can without fail work with any memory device that is made by others. At least Sony understands the need to control their own fate on this one and they too will have to deliver and prove it.
[HarryD] “Hence, I still believe the onus to be on Panasonic. But allow me to be clear: it’s a good product; however, if made cheaper will get more people into “the tent.””
Harry, you need to do the math my friend. The cost of the card can get as low as 1 1/2 cents if you use my earlier example of 50,000 recordings with it, lower if you use till its last dying day which is 100,000 rewrites. So no, the onus on Panasonic is to make sure that the product that they manufacture will handle the 50,000 or the 100,000.
We have a lot of people that are swarming into the tent. It has been the record time that has kept more people away, and with the introduction of the 16GB card I didn’t find but an occasional objection to the length of recording at NAB and the occasional price question, but with the explanation I gave above, they moved on to more serious questions on the adoption of tapeless aquisition. Most discussions were more about how to work the workflow. This is significant.
[HarryD] “Barry: thanks for your comments. I’m not really arguing for a switch to ExpressCard (although I don’t understand why Panasonic didn’t use it in the first place – it was around 4 years ago). As I said, I’m concerned about P2 having “legs” into the future, especially given that we see laptop makers moving steadily away from PCMCIA. “
The first reason is that the Express card is not based on a Chip memory that over 700 manufacturers make or utilize; the SD memory. This in and of itself was the reason that the P2 card was based on the most popular memory card in the business. The second reason is that the Express card was not in every laptop 4 years ago, and the PCMCIA was. The Express card was a hobbyist cool thing and certainly not mainstream. And third, SD was a memory chip that there was a clear path to its doubling the memory size frequently. It seems a long time ago, but only in 2002 the state of the SD memory chip was on the crest of 256MB. I bought my last 64MB SD card for $29.95. (and I still use it with my digital still camera.)
As far as legs, we introduced 2 new cameras, the HPX500, and the HPX3000, at NAB this year and another Workflow product, the P2 Gear. That doesn’t sound like we are trying to find a way to bail out at least not to me. We are committed to continuing with the P2 slot in our cameras and other devices, keep in mind it is absoutely immaterial that the PCs do or do not have a P2 slot. For Panasonic to rely on just the computer industry to make our product work, well that would be foolhardy. That is why in our booth at NAB you would have seen 4 P2 player/transfer devices with our brand name on them, and one from Duel Systems and none of them were computers.
The Duel folks seem to feel that there is enough of a market for the P2 card they made their adapter for the Express Card slot compatible with the P2 card. If they had not done that, it would have been released 9 months ago. I think they get the size of the market for the P2 cards.
And lastly the PCMCIA Card to be included on a computer is the manufacturer’s choice, not the PCMCIA.org. My new laptop which is coming in next week, has two PCMCIA slots. And the PCMCIA.org says that there is no need for further development, as the slot on the computer has reached its maturity. So it doesn’t have to go away. It wasn’t until about 2 years ago that you could buy a laptop without a Floppy drive although I had not used one of those in years. In this way the computer industry can have its changes, but Panasonic does not have to depend on the computer industry for the success of the P2 card.
We have taken the form factor and made it fast, and anything that connects to it as what it is capable of doing, 640 Mbs, will have a real thrill ride in speed. The bus on the side of today’s computer is limited in its speed, other devices do not have to be. I await the day that all of the other ports are this fast.
[HarryD] “I like P2 a lot; not having to deal with a tape drive is like heaven! Of course, I haven’t lost a card or drive in field yet, either (but I have both lost and damaged tapes, so to me it’s the same thing). But I feel that P2 is generally more robust than a 1/4″ or 1/2″ piece of mylar. And I swear, I love not having to worry about having enough tape on the shoot anymore. It’s the little things… :-)”
That is the whole point. The guys in the audio world have been working in the Solid Styate Domain for years. LA studios are littered with 24 track audio tape machines that haven’t been turned on in years. It is all going direct to solid state or the HDD. SD memory has revolutionized the Newspaper industry. Solid State memory will revolutionize the video industry. By taking control over the memory form factor and making it consistant and reliable we have guaranteed the future of the format, this is something to be happy about and yes, the memory prices will always come down as that have from day one.
Best,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[Stan Timek] ”
I didn’t know that P2 cards were made by hand – wouldn’t robotic construction provide for more consistency and accuracy? Especially in the areas of soldering, component placement, etc.?”Actually to make and train a machine to do it would cost in the neighborhood of 2-3 million dollars and then it could output about 5000peices a day. To not output what it can do would put the machine at rest too many hours and would be a loss of revenue. The world cannot support 5000 P2 cards a day. The SD memory world cannot give us enough memory to make that many P2 cards a day. It doe not make economic sense.
[Stan Timek] “The multiple check points for QC are laudable and I’m sure necessary for the MTBF Panasonic is shooting for… but I was always told that the robitic assembly lines were the way to create consistency and high quality.”
And they could be but to gear up to it and to keep feeding it is a necessary part of the implementaiton.
[Stan Timek] “Just trying to understand the rational behind the process (one that obviously works extremely well.) “
I understand and asked the very same question myself, and I didn’t come up with these answers, I am merely telling you what was told to me. Robotics are cool if you cna keep them busy and boy do they have the throughput. It is a hypnotic thing to watch if you have never seen circuit boards assembled by machine. Absolutely amazing. But expensive to set up and if there is not a need for thousands a day, way too costly.
Hope that helps,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[Christopher Wright] “(Unless, of course, the P2 cards reach 64 GB capacity each and sell for around $500.00!)”
They probably will, but that is a few years away. 😉
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Another thing to throw in there on pricing — there are a few things that’ll bring pricing down, such as quantity of units out there and competition. But another thing that I think may have influenced the price drops is: they’ve now got massive networks buying thousands of P2 cards at a time! All Fox owned & operated stations are going exclusively P2, the Australian Broadcasting Company is 100% P2, one of New Zealand’s national broadcasters, TV3, is 100% P2. India’s largest independent news/content producer uses hundreds of HVX200s and shoots everything to P2.
This means that they’re not answering to a few individual customers, they have massive corporate buyers strongarming them for the best price they can get. Frankly this is good for all of us; it brings prices down quickly and it also shows the guarantee of longevity. Panasonic couldn’t bail out on P2 even if they wanted to!
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Wow!
You should work there!
David
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Thank you for the explanation Jan. You are, of course, absolutely correct. I didn’t consider the throughput aspect of robotic assembly lines. When I first started my career I had the opportunity to work for Air Products and Chemicals and did sales/marketing work for their Specialty Gases division. (They provide products to the semiconductor industry) At the Semicon West trade show I had the opportunity to see those robotic assembly systems at work – mesmerizing to say the least!
Again, Thanks for everything.
Stan Timek
Pollywog Theater
http://www.pollywogtheater.com— check out —
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