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Is there a bundle with 5 cards for $23k?

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How many ENG style p2 cameras Panny has sold? 100? 500?
How many cards? 500? 1000?
There has to be two more digits in these numbers before any 3rd party manufacturer gets interested.
Before that there is no competition.
I’d rather pay $8k for the camera if 8GB cards were less than $1k…

How many tv channels will buy nonHD cameras next year?
Sony has been selling F900 for five years.
Varicam has been in market for four years.
There has to be new models soon.
So there might also be new formats.

There might be need for p2 adapter for eg. compact flash.
CF cards have same size than p2 now and fastest CF cards record faster than 80Mbps.
Still the price is less than 1/5th of p2…

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“5 average” = 5 years average
(How an earth every other forum has ability to edit your posts afterwards?
Cows are not creative?)

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Yep,
but one year ago 512MB SD costed $120 per piece.
So the price has dropped to less than 1/3rd in one year, but if you take 5 average of all sizes of cards
that has been available, the drop isn’t so dramatic.

And I think that price of SD is not going to drop so much in the future, because consumers don’t
need any bigger cards to their still cameras than what are already caoming to market.
Next big rush will be when consumer videocameras turn to use memory cards.
That might take some years…

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Thanks for the encouragement, Jesse, but if I had that initial investment of $12M, I’d much rather produce a movie.
I’d say that even the major memorycard manufacturers (like Kingston, Sandisk, etc.) will think twice before they make such an investment to “standard” that has practically no mass market now.
I bet that it’s going to be 2007 before we see any other 3rd party vendors than those companies that make p2 cameras. If p2 gets popular…

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Yep,
RAIDing sd cards need that one RAID chip inside the card.
It can’t be very expensive if you compare to RAID chips that pc motherboards have.

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I don’t have a question, but a wish for Panasonic hvx-200 design team:
Please don’t make separate models for 60Hz and 50Hz countries!

Announced “ntsc” model already has “varicam style” framerates @720p,
so there could be 25p & 50p dialed in.

EBU is strongly leaning to recommend progressive only with HD transmissions,
so 50i might get obsolete very soon.

So, the only difference with models would be at 1080p24/30 and 1080p25.
Putting all these 3 speeds to one model would enhance user capabilies
to “crank” the camera greatly!
And people in Europe could make movies in 24fps as an addition to tv programs in 25fps.

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Yep,
actually if z1/fx1 has 960×1080 and it’s sensivity is horroble,
it might even be better if hvx would settle 960×720.
With both horz&vert pix shift there would be enough resolution
for decent 1080p.

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One thing more,
in one of these forums, there was said that Panny will be bundling the camera with 2 8GB cards for $10k.
That leads to over $2k price for separately sold cards.
Now where does this price come from?
When 8GB card will be out, sd chips for it will cost $600 for it in retail.
Of course Panny will get them a whole lot cheaper with big orders.
So memory price quadruples when they are put together by Panny.

So is Panny just trying to make money with p2 cards?
And does that prevent p2 cameras to become popular and kill both the cards and the cameras?

Rough calc for expenses:
Panny wants to produce 1M cards/year = 3000/day = 3 cards/minute (with maintenance breaks etc.)
So one production line is enough.
Lets say that costs $1M and R&D costs $10M and process costs $1M (salaries & other expenses)
Lets assume that card’s shell & one chip to handle dataflow costs $20.
So the expenses per card in addition of the sd memory is $32 per card.
If Panny gets $1800, even if you take all imaginable expenses out, profit will be 50x (5000%)!
Not a bad bisnes, and not a really rare if we keep in mind that HP is doing most of their
profits out of ink and Sony sells a lot of tape.

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[Rennie] “I agree with you though, don’t buy more than you absolutely need because we should be able to practically watch the price fall.”

Maybe it does, or maybe something else comes and p2 is left in niche and prices are never gonna fall.
1995 I was also told that price of these new broadcast quality dv cameras are practically going to fall.
Since then I’ve been waiting for 1/3″ 3ccd 16:9 camera and it came out late 2004…

I wouldn’t be very surprised that we could get in a very near future external solid state memory to these new cameras. One model to all cameras -> volumes are big -> prices drop much more than with p2.

We have already seen this uneven development with some memorycards to still cameras.
(Sony’s memory sticks have surprisingly double price.)