History of P2 cards pricing

J

Jonny Bravo

Carbonite Member
4Gb-8GB-16GB-32GB & soon 64GB

what has been the pricing on each card & what had been the reduction on cards with each new card being introduced. may be this way one can estimate how much a 32GB card will cost after a 64Gb release & how much can 64Gb cost to us !!!
 
Well, since the introduction of the 16GB cards, there have been no price reductions as far as I know. I have not heard of any plans to reduce pricing once the 64GB card is released either. But sooner or later, I would think the price will have to come down at least some, as $3200 for a 64GB card will be out of reach for all but the big-budget studios.
 
if its gonna be 3200$ for 64GB card then i am v happy to say it shall be a death kneal or the last nail to Panasonic's coffin already ready to engulf it any day.

i am so much inclined for PW335 now as i feel P2 investment shall be a foolish investment for me as i m not a tv channel who uses up a 1000 tapes a month so to say i wont be saving as proclaimed by the ponny :( panny
 
Jonny Bravo said:
if its gonna be 3200$ for 64GB card then i am v happy to say it shall be a death kneal or the last nail to Panasonic's coffin already ready to engulf it any day.

i am so much inclined for PW335 now as i feel P2 investment shall be a foolish investment for me as i m not a tv channel who uses up a 1000 tapes a month so to say i wont be saving as proclaimed by the ponny :( panny
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bravo, where are you getting your information? you seem to know a lot about panasonic's financials and overall success with the p2 technology. do tell.
 
the prices will always come down of course. that is how storage works. in 1997 i paid something like $900 for a 1GB scsi hard drive. now, 10 years or so later you can get a drive 1000x that size for 1/10 of the price. look at 4gb p2 cards on ebay. they are sooo cheap now compared to where they started. i would guess that by this time next year, the 32gb cards will be half of what they are now.
 
Maybe Pana should have had a regular schedule of product releases to work to, so that we all know how our investment in their products will suit our workflows. (maybe Too much to ask for?).
I personally think P2 card pricing is above what it should be, Cost per gig V XDCam disc's is a no brainer, that's why networks here in Australia have picked the disc over P2. P2 has many many advantages for sure , but the "killer" is the media costs, and the slowness of Pana to supply most products.
My example for this, when I bought my SPX camera it took just a few days to fly it in from overseas to me via a very good authorised Pana dealer, it then took "weeks" for Panasonic to supply the SDI and the Firewire cards, took a few hours to fit same by techo.
I was told by people in the supply industry that's not unusual from pana.

Cards will come down, But by how much, and when, is in the hands of the Pana gods.
PS, my first Avid 9gig HDD cost me nearly $4,000 Aud , now 1TB is $200 ?. that took over ten years, we have a long way to go yet with P2 cards.

Cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au
 
I went to a Panasonic event at Abel Cine in Burbank today. The Panasonic rep said that 64 GB cards would be shipping in November, meaning that they would be in dealer hands by Thanksgiving.

He said the list price would be $2800 per card, but another rep said he thought they could go as low as $2200.

Either way, I think that's too expensive. To get people charged about P2 again, I think the price needs to be about $1600-$2000 tops.

Honestly, I think Panasonic has done a good job in inventing the P2 cards themselves, but a lousy job in anticipating how people will view spending thousands of dollars on media up front, or in coming up with a streamlined workflow for backing up and archiving the data. Most P2 experts suggest backing up your cards to two independent hard drives, so to the price of the cards, you now have to add the expense of the hard drives. And of course, since hard drives are not long-term storage devices, then you've got to get LTO-3 or 4 tape, which adds many more thousands of dollars to your purchase price. No wonder a lot of people just prefer to deal with tape, or XDCAM disk.

Also, Panasonic has done virtually no work in making it easy for the filmmaker/producer to find the right solutions to backing up and archiving data. Panasonic could have picked some hard drive manufacturers, and worked with them to develop some P2 friendly products, and then marketed those products as "Panasonic-recommended", which would give a lot of people some peace of mind. Instead, the company just took a very laissez faire attitude toward the market, and leaves each filmmaker/producer to research the best workflow strategies from scratch, and patch together solutions from multiple vendors, etc. Again, no wonder many people just opt for the easier road.

I still believe in P2, but sometimes it feels like my faith exists in spite of Panasonic, not because of it.
 
K2director,
I could not agree more with your assessment of the P2 situation as it is now. Pana maybe happy to be cruising along at their current pace, who knows, time will tell.
I for one as you mentioned have spent the last nine months getting a Budget Simple P2 card reader for my Macpro, only because I could not "justify" the expense of the Pana "solution."

Cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au
 
cheezweezl said:
the prices will always come down of course. that is how storage works.
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That is how the storage market works, but I would not include "proprietary" storage in that group.

P2 can be set at any level Panasonic desires as there are relatively few camera owners, and even fewer other choices.

The Firestore, Nnovia or The Flash XDR seem like all one has outside of P2.

I am looking at the Flash XDR as I have not purchased any P2 cards because they are expensive with longer recording times.

I will be shooting a of of 60p stuff and a hour or three will eat you up with P2...
 
Bassman2003 said:
That is how the storage market works, but I would not include "proprietary" storage in that group.

P2 can be set at any level Panasonic desires as there are relatively few camera owners, and even fewer other choices.

The Firestore, Nnovia or The Flash XDR seem like all one has outside of P2.

I am looking at the Flash XDR as I have not purchased any P2 cards because they are expensive with longer recording times.

I will be shooting a of of 60p stuff and a hour or three will eat you up with P2...
Click to expand...

ya i guess they could charge whatever they want but who is going to buy a p2 camera if the storage is way out of line price-wise? the cards have been dropping since day one and will continue to do so.
 
cheezweezl said:
the prices will always come down of course. that is how storage works. in 1997 i paid something like $900 for a 1GB scsi hard drive. now, 10 years or so later you can get a drive 1000x that size for 1/10 of the price. look at 4gb p2 cards on ebay. they are sooo cheap now compared to where they started. i would guess that by this time next year, the 32gb cards will be half of what they are now.
Click to expand...

Waoh which means any user will have to wait Juuuuuuuuuuuuuust 10 LONG grilling years for the P2 cards to become affordable. waoh, by then some one would be trying hard to remember of panasonic a company doomed for its futile tech called P2 !!! Good for your though but for the time now i or any sensible purchase it has to be a XDCAM disk may be you can wait for 10long years may be by then either company dooms or the P2 tech is biting dust !
 
its is quite possible that by the time P2 cards become v cheap the other XDCAM owners ay be laughing their way to banks cox of the profits they would have made cox of cheap media .... whereas the poor P2 user may still be saving hard for the dayz to buy few more P2 cards, few more 100000GB of HDD to make atleast 2 copies of the safe data ... Man it sucks, how can panny make such a technology after their great DVCPRO tape based systems !

i suggest them to make their cards much affordable so that not only the countable Few 10-20 networks accross the world but also independent film makers like us to ownthis tech. its not the camera which is great but also the greater magnitude of price one has to add up with each unit one has to bnuy. in p2 case one to cough up the price in shape of p2 cards of so called years of tape or disks cost. its not business sense. may be a few years down the lane like DVCAM/pro are fading away against the High Def format. who know what the sony & panny ha sin future for us to vive for.

we have seen so many tech changes over the years since the death of betacamSP format till then it was only sony. now you have sony panny jvc & few more with their own format. they all have dented the place of sony's supremecy but still no one except for sony has emerged as clear winner. i am not against any company but i am truly against any technology wich asks us to cough up our last epnny to make a equipment usable like P2 which is nothign with out a ton of storage & some dozen of P2 cards. i prefer sony as its has the simplicity of usikng a disk changing like tape & reuse them after the project os over. simple you invest in media as yoru need for more disks is required 7 its much simpler to invest in small steps otherwise unlike the P2 uphill cost. i know in heart any p2 user is feeling the same... shot shot & suddenly stop to dump all the p2 to few dozen hdd with redundant copies for double safety. Man thats not what we are to work like when onfield we should not be bothering anything exceot for the shoot !

i feel so may be someone down this post will BEG to differ. No offences taken & none passed on.
 
Jonny,
P2 is not for everyone. And it sounds like you have talked yourself into a Sony rig, which is fine. They make great equipment too.

But for me, I am not sorry that I made the decision to go the P2 route, as a matter of fact, I really like it. Storage drives are very affordable, I don't have tapes stacking up all over the place, I can finally catalog and search my media drives for older footage (if I am diligent with my metadata), and the list goes on.

Do I think the price of cards should come down? Absolutely - and I believe over time they will.

Is P2 technology perfect? Not by a long stretch. As a matter of fact, I hate that every time I stop the recording, it creates another file that I have to later sort through. But nonetheless, for our studio, at least, the workflow is working well, the equipment is very dependable, and I was able to set myself up with 2 fully outfitted HPX500's and 8 16GB P2 cards for $60,000. Just a few short years ago, it would have taken that amount to build one kit of equal performance - plus thousands more for a decent VTR.

I am quite content.

Best of luck on your search...

-Brad
 
Jonny Bravo said:
Waoh which means any user will have to wait Juuuuuuuuuuuuuust 10 LONG grilling years for the P2 cards to become affordable. waoh, by then some one would be trying hard to remember of panasonic a company doomed for its futile tech called P2 !!! Good for your though but for the time now i or any sensible purchase it has to be a XDCAM disk may be you can wait for 10long years may be by then either company dooms or the P2 tech is biting dust !
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10 years to be affordable? no. that is rediculous.

my 11 year analysis in math terms.

1997 - my 1GB drive was $900

2008 - a 1TB drive can be had for $100

we went from $900 per GB to 10 cents per GB in 11 years.

so applying the same formula to p2 prices today, in 11 years a 16gb card would cost you 9 cents.

is that affordable enough?
 
Ever heard of "Moore's Law"? For those interested in further understanding of how the price game with tech may pan out i suggest its worth a quick review. It has something highly relevant to this subject matter and well worth taking a peak for those waiting for prices to fall. The prices will fall on p2 according to this and storage/performance/cost ratio will also exponentially work in favor of the consumer. It's just a matter of time before the 64gig p2's roll out and they will have an appropriate price point that will also eventually slope down over time. It's just a matter of patience on part of the professional community and we should continue producing quality productions until technology catches up with us.;-)
 
Jonny

If you have to compare apples to oranges then please compare P2 cards to SxS Cards.
I work in this business for over 20 years now. I now own three P2 Cameras. More to come. Yes there is a workflow involved. Today there is a marriage between videography an the IT Business. Storage is a IT-problem not a videographers. If you're not willing to go that road, then stick with HDV Tapes. They are really cheap. I'd never trust a LongGOP format on a very small tape, but it's cheap.

Funny thing is, that all the Sony fans were ranting as hell in the beginning of P2. Now with the SxS cards used by the EX-1 and the EX-2 these discussions are gone. Even funnier. The Sony guys suddenly stated that THEY invented the IT-workflow with memory cards. LOL.

For someone who joined this forum just a few days ago you are making a lot of noise.
So please stop ranting on something that has been discussed a thousand times.

P.S. My six 8GB cards and three 32GB Cards payd themselves over whithin no time.
Accept the P2 workflow or seek joy elsewhere.

Peter
 
cheezweezl said:
10 years to be affordable? no. that is rediculous.

my 11 year analysis in math terms.

1997 - my 1GB drive was $900

2008 - a 1TB drive can be had for $100

we went from $900 per GB to 10 cents per GB in 11 years.

so applying the same formula to p2 prices today, in 11 years a 16gb card would cost you 9 cents.

is that affordable enough?
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I still have to disagree.

This is not a competition driven space with huge market deployment like desktop memory or hard drives.

This is a select few targeted market segements with a proprietary hardware device.

The rapid cost decrease we have seen in the IT world does not have to apply.

Panasonic knows their market and will lower the cost when they see it hurting camera sales imho.

Who says they have to lower the price of the 32gb cards when the 64gb comes out?

The world competition police?

I don't care for it, but memory for cameras has become another revenue stream for Sony and Panasonic, and they are not going to just give it away.
 
I just hope by the time the price comes down enough for the rest of us to be able to afford one or two sets of four/five cards, it will not be another obsolete technology. I have no doubt that may be the case. Same goes to Sony's XDCam optical disc.

Did any of you guys/ladies know why other companies such as FUJI, Maxell, etc. didn't come up with similar technology at cheaper prices?
 
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