cheezweezl
Veteran
The customers. You and me.
If your theory holds true and Panny holds memory prices high while everyone else in the world continues to drop, they will sell less cards and cameras. They won't do this.
History of P2 cards pricing
- Thread starter Jonny Bravo
- Start date
The customers. You and me.
If your theory holds true and Panny holds memory prices high while everyone else in the world continues to drop, they will sell less cards and cameras. They won't do this.
andy mace
Well-known member
You know it would be really simple to ***** about the price if the card was strictly memory. It isn't. It's a RAID controller with multiple memory modules. Given the bandwidth required to record data, the compact size and the extra reliability RAID provides, I'd say the pricing, while disappointing, is in line with the technology.
Bassman2003
Veteran
One could say they are already doing this.
Look at the price of Flash memory it is nowhere near the equivelent price of P2 cards.
My point is that P2 is not a commodity like flash memory or hard drives, so it does not move with the same market pressures.
Are you going to sell your cameras if P2 pricing does not come down?
Even if you do, this does not effect Panasonic.
They have their margins to keep and they know their market.
The price of P2 will come down when Panasonic says it will come down.
The price per gig of P2 *has* come down, considerably.
k2director
Well-known member
I have a hard time believing that the raid controller in a P2 card makes up an appreciable part of the cost. The vast majority of a P2 card's cost should be the memory itself, and those prices are plunging. We really should see quicker reflection of that in P2 prices.
When you can get a 133x 32GB CF card for $85-$115, while a 32GB P2 card costs $1550....well, that really makes me wonder about Panasonic's pricing. Yes, the CF card doesn't have the same speed of the P2 card, but a P2 card gets its speed from raiding a bunch of slower chips together. Shouldn't those chips that make up the raid still be a lot less expensive than $1550 for 32Gb?
cheezweezl
Veteran
....and CONSISTANTLY from the beginning.
I have no idea why some of you think Panasonic will freeze prices. No basis for this thinking.
Build one to P2 specs (speed, reliability, error rate) and find out.
The price on P2 has been stable at ~ $50/GB for quite some time now.
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cheezweezl
Veteran
Maybe so but this opens up a whole new can of worms. Is the RAID really necessary?
The RED records 4k raw to CF cards. That is a much much higher data rate than DVCPRO.
I do agree with you that a P2 is not just 4 SD cards in a box. However your theory only goes so far. Same RAID in all cards. Only the storage increases. Still, a 32GB card is nearly double the cost of a 16GB so it's not just about the RAID. The price difference between 4- 4gb SD cards (16gb) and 4- 8gb SD cards (32gb) is only $40 or so.
Like anything in the film industry, P2 cards are priced based on what people will pay. Same rules of competition apply but you can't compare the price of a card for your cellphone to a card for your PRO HD camera.
k2director
Well-known member
If I had the resources of a huge, multinational corporation like Panasonic, I would! And I bet I'd be able to deliver the technology for cheaper! ;-)
Seriously, Panasonic has bet its whole professional product line on P2 cards, and yet P2 cards haven't exactly taken the industry by storm. A lot of people have reservations about them, from the price to the archival issues, etc.
It's really in Panasonic's best interest to make P2 cards as easy for people to embrace as possible, because in many cases, the P2 cards are selling Panasonic's cameras as much as the cameras themselves. There's a lot at stake, and competing memory formats are making P2 cards look like obscene luxuries. Panasonic needs to take this growing perception very seriously....
Which "industry"? They've done rather well with ENG.
The point is, until you actually know what all's involved in the engineering of a P2 card, I don't think you're in a particularly good position to determine what it should cost. (I don't mean "you" personally, just the general "you.") Apparently Panasonic's pricing isn't especially out of line considering SxS cards cost about the same per gig.
And again, the price per gig has dropped immensely.
It seems to me that one of the problems from the get-go is that people continue to equate them with things like tape or recordable DVDs. It's just not what they are. They're hardware, a part of the camera.
Nor are they consumer flash cards in a RAID. They're zero-defect, high-transfer cards which cost a lot more than the cards you'd buy at Wal-Mart. They are as much the same as their consumer counterparts as the cameras are compared to consumer handicams.
The point is, until you actually know what all's involved in the engineering of a P2 card, I don't think you're in a particularly good position to determine what it should cost. (I don't mean "you" personally, just the general "you.") Apparently Panasonic's pricing isn't especially out of line considering SxS cards cost about the same per gig.
And again, the price per gig has dropped immensely.
It seems to me that one of the problems from the get-go is that people continue to equate them with things like tape or recordable DVDs. It's just not what they are. They're hardware, a part of the camera.
Nor are they consumer flash cards in a RAID. They're zero-defect, high-transfer cards which cost a lot more than the cards you'd buy at Wal-Mart. They are as much the same as their consumer counterparts as the cameras are compared to consumer handicams.
walnutcrunch
Well-known member
Well put. I mean I'm shocked at the lengths people are going to with cameras like the EX1 to bypass SxS with some kind of homebrew setup, tested by tens of people, just to save the money on the SxS. I wouldn't dream of putting footage at risk like that.
I need 100% reliable or I will lose my mind. I'm just not going to take a chance on something that has worked so far as we know.
P2 cards are probably more expensive than they should be but I'd like to believe that they are not, and I'd like to believe it's not a fluke that we've had no problems whatsoever with the cards. I'd like to think that money was well spent on a tested and ultra reliable recording medium. Panny is no doubt making money on them but how much? Who knows. Panny says the cards are raided, hand assembled, and ultra high quality and totally reliable and therefore expensive. Dude says futureshop has a card for 80 bucks that is every bit as good if only it could be wedged in a camera. Right now I've got to believe Panny.
TwistedLincoln
Veteran
I find it terribly funny how people are so quick to attack Panasonic over their P2 pricing.
Who cares how much it costs Panasonic to make the cards? What if it only cost them $0.25 each? Would it make a difference? No.
Panasonic will price their cards the same way every business prices their products -- at the highest level the market will bear. I'm willing to bet that just one of those news studios buys more P2 cards from Panasonic each year than every single indie filmmaker has ever bought COMBINED. So as long as those "few customers" are buying enough cards at the higher prices, Panasonic has no reason to lower them just to make their cameras more appealing to those of us who couldn't otherwise afford them.
Panasonic has lowered their prices relative to the size of the cards quite considerably -- but then they discontinue the lower end cards, not slash the prices. So the prices never really changed much, you just get more for the money. That makes sense-- it encourages larger organizations to upgrade their cards rather than buy smaller ones (and thus making P2 more appearling in general), and it has the side effect of making the entire platform more suitible for people like us.
I love P2, but like everyone else would rather see the cards be much, much cheaper. But I recognize that I can never buy enough cards to warrant Panasonic to care one way or another about my business, and so it's up to me to decide if I can live with the prices.
And guess what? I can live with them. I didn't like it, but I bought my cards anyway. And I'm not alone.
Who cares how much it costs Panasonic to make the cards? What if it only cost them $0.25 each? Would it make a difference? No.
Panasonic will price their cards the same way every business prices their products -- at the highest level the market will bear. I'm willing to bet that just one of those news studios buys more P2 cards from Panasonic each year than every single indie filmmaker has ever bought COMBINED. So as long as those "few customers" are buying enough cards at the higher prices, Panasonic has no reason to lower them just to make their cameras more appealing to those of us who couldn't otherwise afford them.
Panasonic has lowered their prices relative to the size of the cards quite considerably -- but then they discontinue the lower end cards, not slash the prices. So the prices never really changed much, you just get more for the money. That makes sense-- it encourages larger organizations to upgrade their cards rather than buy smaller ones (and thus making P2 more appearling in general), and it has the side effect of making the entire platform more suitible for people like us.
I love P2, but like everyone else would rather see the cards be much, much cheaper. But I recognize that I can never buy enough cards to warrant Panasonic to care one way or another about my business, and so it's up to me to decide if I can live with the prices.
And guess what? I can live with them. I didn't like it, but I bought my cards anyway. And I'm not alone.
Why should a hunk of curved glass cost a couple grand? For that matter, why can't they just make it out of a cheaper material, like plastic?
k2director
Well-known member
I've also never understood the kludge solutions that some people are putting together. That's why I never bought one of those Firestore systems for my HVX--I wouldn't call the Firestore a kludge, but using P2 cards was so much more carefree and elegant, I was totally willing to pay the extra $$ for that privilege.
However, I will say that it's now about 3 years since the HVX200 came out, and I am still running into some limitations with P2 cards that I'm losing patience with. After 3 years, I want to shoot all day with the cards, at 1080, and not have to worry about data wrangling in the middle of the day. 64 Gb cards finally allow me to do that, but spending $14,000 on the P2 media ($2800 x 5 cards) to simply store a day's worth of footage feels too expensive to me. We all have different limits, but I guess that's mine.
Also, maybe Panasonic does indeed sell so much product to huge TV networks/studios that it doesn't care about the independent filmmaker, but that would honestly surprise me. The original Varicam was an independent filmmaker/videographers' camera. So is the HVX200. So are many of the cameras that Panasonic sells (you can't tell me that news stations are buying the vast majority of HPX500s or 3000s out there). I think small studios and independent shooters make up a respectable amount of the market (at least in the States), and Panasonic needs to address their needs...
Anyway, I'll be more or less happy if the 64 GB cards come in around $1600-$1800. That's been the high-end price point for all previous cards, and that would be reasonable to me. Fingers crossed...
You would be storing HUNDREDS of days of worth of footage on it.
See, this is what I'm talking about. Most people who are complaining about the pricing speak as though you're only going to use the cards once.
andy mace
Well-known member
Volume production makes things cheap. It's not an easy matter to take off the shelf memory and make some whiz bang new thing like P2. There's a lot of engineering and tooling to make an assembly line. Put all that together with low volume and P2 might begin to sound cheap.
I've often wondered that myself. I shoot events and when that one special thing happens, I can't afford to loose it. Bring on all the raid you can. But then again, tape worked fine for years and computer memory HAS to be reliable and accurate time and time again. Is the redundancy overkill? P2 was probably born out of the need to increase bandwidth not reliability. Once SD memory throughput improves enough, I bet Panasonic could make a cheap P2 to SDHC adapter. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.
k2director
Well-known member
I appreciate that you can use the cards multiple times. But the upfront cost is extremely high. Let's say 5 64 GB cards, for 6.5 hours at 1080/24, costs $14000. For that price, you could buy 200 XDCAM HD disks, 50 GB capacity. That's quite a few disks (and they're also reusable, multiple times over...that aspect of the technology is proven). And, of course, you wouldn't have to buy 200 disks upfront. You could buy them as your productions required, which means you can spread your $14K investment over many months.
I'm not saying XDCAM HD is superior, far from it. I'd prefer a great solid-state card, but $14K for a day's shooting capacity is too much, IMO.
It's Panasonic's responsibility to develop a technology that can significantly benefit from plunging memory prices. If it can't lower prices to keep up with other flash memory products, simply because it has such a low volume business, then Panasonic should have developed a better solution, or waited until its solution became more realistic.
Again, I can understand a premium price for P2 cards. But $100 for a very fast 32GB CF card, vs $1550 for a 32 GB P2 card, sounds like an unrealistically steep premium. If Panasonic wants to see higher sales volume, it's going to have to take the lead and actually price the cards lower to stimulate demand. I doubt appreciable demand will show up on its own...
I second that.
cheezweezl
Veteran
let's not forget the business we are in here...
if you want to talk about inflated prices we can find much better examples. how about matteboxes? follow focuses?
how about steadicams? $60,000 for a vest, a spring arm, and a stick to put your camera on. yes, it's extremely well engineered but so is a brand new mercedes-benz and they are the same price...
been to p+s technik's website lately? how about $6000 for a 3 wheel dolly that can be copied at home for around $100.
i paid $500 for a small jib. of course, minus the part that connects to the tripod, it's basically a $79 swingset from target.
we are in the film/video business. prices for gear will always be higher than you want them to be. get over it.
High speed CF cards are plenty fast enough to record anything the cam can dish out. panasonic could have just put a CF slot or two on their cams and called it a day. but they know what they are doing. they went proprietary and now they can charge what the market will pay and they don't have to compete with sandisk.
yes, the cards are highly inflated. suck it up and think about what you are saving in tape cost, tape deck cost, and time to log and capture tapes.
if you want to talk about inflated prices we can find much better examples. how about matteboxes? follow focuses?
how about steadicams? $60,000 for a vest, a spring arm, and a stick to put your camera on. yes, it's extremely well engineered but so is a brand new mercedes-benz and they are the same price...
been to p+s technik's website lately? how about $6000 for a 3 wheel dolly that can be copied at home for around $100.
i paid $500 for a small jib. of course, minus the part that connects to the tripod, it's basically a $79 swingset from target.
we are in the film/video business. prices for gear will always be higher than you want them to be. get over it.
High speed CF cards are plenty fast enough to record anything the cam can dish out. panasonic could have just put a CF slot or two on their cams and called it a day. but they know what they are doing. they went proprietary and now they can charge what the market will pay and they don't have to compete with sandisk.
yes, the cards are highly inflated. suck it up and think about what you are saving in tape cost, tape deck cost, and time to log and capture tapes.