16 gig cards "very soon"

Steve Shovlar

Steve Shovlar

DVXuser Sponsor
I spoke to the Panasonic P2 Manager today at the VideoForum in Earls Court London, who showed me the cards and how they were made. He said they had already started manufacturing 16 gig P2 cards in Japan, and that the road map is for up to 128 gig cards in a about 2-3 years time.

So expect a further price cut of the 4 and 8 gig cards as soon as these launch.
 
I wouldn't hold your breath just yet.
We heard the same thing about 8GB cards, which were announced last year, and they are just now becomming available.

My guess is that the 16gb cards will be officially announced at NAB, and probably won't ship until the fall at the earliest.
So, you're probably right - we'll see a price cut in the current card offerings - but I don't think that'll happen for at least another 6-8 months or so.

But what do I know?
Not much.
 
Panasonic's ambitious "P2 Road Map," indicates 16 gb in 2006, 32 & 64 gb in 2007, and 128 gb in 2008.

But, like Luis says, I wouldn't hold your breath. On another note, I wonder how many years it will take until an hour of P2 costs $2? I'm only asking because I shoot tons of DV tape ($2), and to truly simulate that 20:1 shooting behavior, and the idea of feeling free to record anything, without financial constraints, P2 cards will have to drop substantially in price (I know it's not a fair comparison, but you get the idea).
 
It's not only an unfair comparison, it's really a pretty dumb one. Considering the P2 cards obviously aren't meant to be archived on, unlike DV tape which you use one and then put it in the shelf.

Burn the stuff on DVD, one disc takes 4,5 minutes of 1080 and costs something like 20 cents nowadays (buying bulk).

So, to answer your question, probably never.
 
I remember buying a 20MB hard drive for my MacPlus. Price tag = $600. $30/MB. I recently bought a 1GB memory stick to transfer media between computers. Price tag = $19 after mail in rebate. Even with the "new" math that's an incredible difference. Now, I will grant you that it has been 15 years.

So $30 * 1000 MB = $30,000. Today $19. Let me get my calculator out....well, you get the idea. Memory will get cheaper.

It's even a bigger change if you look at the price of 300 GB or 500 GB hard drives today.

What the hell am I talking about? It's past my bedtime...:shocked:
 
I remember hiking to school each morning through snow up to my knees in 0 degree weather.

My boots were tattered and jacket worn to its last string, but still I fought my way through the thick freezing snow.

I remember when bubble gum cost you 5 cents and a comic cost the same.

I remember when you could buy a gallon of gas for 50 cents.
 
Panny "managers" have this strange promise disease. I wouldn't count on what they say, especially when it comes to timeframes. As for the 1000TB single SD card, other manufacturers will have other much cheaper solutions long before that. P2 is a great idea, the problem is it's using slow infrastructure (USB, laptop HDDs etc) and it's horribly expensive. Solid state is the answer or who knows, some very fast wi-fi , when you'll be able to stream your content straight into your editor at home/work, but P2 will not be around that long, many other million times cheaper solutions exist already in the labs.
 
Blaine said:
I remember buying a 20MB hard drive for my MacPlus. Price tag = $600. $30/MB. I recently bought a 1GB memory stick to transfer media between computers. Price tag = $19 after mail in rebate. Even with the "new" math that's an incredible difference. Now, I will grant you that it has been 15 years.

So $30 * 1000 MB = $30,000. Today $19. Let me get my calculator out....well, you get the idea. Memory will get cheaper.

It's even a bigger change if you look at the price of 300 GB or 500 GB hard drives today.

What the hell am I talking about? It's past my bedtime...:shocked:
Click to expand...

$19 for 1 gig memory stick is a pretty good deal for today's prices!

I'm Hoping the 16gig card is available when the Pal model releases...I suspect the price will be $2200 (the original 8gig price).

What I really do hope is for a 200gig P2store. This is what I need for field Shooting in a day (about 3 hours and 20 minutes)- at the price of the current unit, of course !
 
Mr. Blonde, gas at FIFTY CENTS? Hey young-en, I remember when it was 34 cents a gallon, and a pack of smokes was 29 cents. Then again, you made like 50 cents an hour!

The biggest impedament to cheaper P2 cards is that when you jump from 8GB to higher amounts of memory, the micron pitch of the circuitry drops. What the hell does this mean? Well, it goes from being MF small, .08 microns, to so IF small of .035 microns. The cost of a fab to do this is around 1-2 BILLION dollars. So even if Panasonic leases production time at one of these, they have to cover the fixed overhead...which if my math is correct is $154,499.33 per HOUR, and this is just to cover the cost of the investment in the buildings and equipment. Raw materials, wages, and other variable costs are extra.
So how is it that all other memory and hard drive size keeps getting cheaper? It is because the fab lines to make them, or the facilities to make the HD platters, are actually the old cast off fab lines of TODAYS state-of the art facility. The 1-2 billion dollar facility that Panasonic makes the current P2s on will be "obsolete" in 18-24 months. At the end of that time, they will have another facility to make the even BIGGER (128GB cards?) capacity cards. So what do they do with todays facility? Well, if they're leasing it, they just move to another facilty. But that facility then makes "commodity" products...cheap memory for consumer products, etc. Notice how cheaply you buy that 1 GB memory stick? That's because the initial cost of the facility was paid for two-three years ago when it was producing THENs REALLY BIG memory for PCs--high $$ stuff. Now they can make cheap commodity memory and cicuits because the facility was already paid for.
 
Mr. Blonde said:
I remember hiking to school each morning through snow up to my knees in 0 degree weather.

My boots were tattered and jacket worn to its last string, but still I fought my way through the thick freezing snow.

I remember when bubble gum cost you 5 cents and a comic cost the same.

I remember when you could buy a gallon of gas for 50 cents.
Click to expand...


FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You're right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an' all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL:
They won't!
 
My Hovercraft is full of 'eels!

hungaria.jpg


Always glad to meet a Pythonesque figure in the Forums!
 
Hi,

My prediction is that the 16GB card will likely be announced at NAB and as Luis says it likely will be available at the end of the year. We introduced the the 8GB card at NAB last year and shipped the first ones in December of 2005.

As far as what The Engineer says; you know as long as you throw away laws of physics and the practicability of real production video in the work place you are possibly correct for today. ;-)

Best regards,

Jan
 
To amplify somewhat on Jan's comment, we should remember that P2 cards are arrays of 4 SD cards (and zero-defect cards, at that). Up to this point, the largest capacity SD card has been 2 gb, but the 4 gb cards have just been announced. So, we will see 16 gb P2 cards as soon as production actually ramps up on the 4 gb cards and there is sufficient supply of those cards at the tolerances needed to create P2 raids. End of '06 sounds right.

Hope you're feeling better, Jan, and see you at NAB!

Ned Soltz
 
The Engineer said:
P2 is a great idea, the problem is it's using slow infrastructure (USB, laptop HDDs etc) and it's horribly expensive. Solid state is the answer or who knows, some very fast wi-fi , when you'll . . . .
Click to expand...

Maybe I am miss-reading your comment, but P2 is "Solid state", and doesn't have anything to do with USB, or Laptop HDDs. It is also my understanding that P2 is a memory card with smaller memory cards inside. So, as new solid state technologies emerge, that can be incorporated into the P2 enclosure.

On a side note: I have had opportunities to use an HVX with 2 4GB P2 cards, and I love it. I was on a shoot getting b-roll for a promo with a lot of down-time. In between shots I could instantly review clips and delete ones that were worthless and get a better hold of what I should still shoot. Once I edit the promo, I'll be grateful for the first pass I took while on the shoot.
On a later shoot I was using the HVX with a glidecam smooth shooter. To get shots "just right" takes practice and several attempts with my current skill level. I was able to view each shot immeadiately afterwards with the director. No timecode breaks, and no: "yeah, I think we got what we wanted somewhere in there."

Exciting times indeed.
~Ian
 
The Engineer said:
Solid state is the answer
Click to expand...

P2 is solid state. It is 4 SD cards, with a RAID controller and error correction, in a PCMCIA shell. It's a miniature, solid-state RAID.
 
Focus This! said:
The 1-2 billion dollar facility that Panasonic makes the current P2s on will be "obsolete" in 18-24 months.
Click to expand...

To the best of my knowledge, Panasonic does not make the SD cards which go inside the PCMCIA shell. Other companies do. Panasonic just takes 4 SD cards, a RAID controller, and packs it into the PCMCIA shell. The price is dictated by SD memory. There's no way Panasonic (an acquisition company) would get into the solid state memory business. All the solid state memory companies would eat their lunch.
 
Blaine said:
I remember buying a 20MB hard drive for my MacPlus. Price tag = $600. $30/MB. I recently bought a 1GB memory stick to transfer media between computers. Price tag = $19 after mail in rebate. Even with the "new" math that's an incredible difference. Now, I will grant you that it has been 15 years.
Click to expand...

Applying Moore's law, price of memory should halve every 18 months so in 15 years it should have halved 10 times or about to 1/1000.
So the price of "memory stick" seems to be quite fine.
But what about price of p2? It's about 175$/GB. So its price is 6 years behind of "memory stick".
 
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