Cheapest 4gb P2

Obviously not the same card. No crystal ball but word is October and the 16 gig will be the same as current price for the 8 gig. Which means a big reduction on 8 gigs and a reduction on 4gigs as well. I'm trying to rent them for testing, a music video and a short film. Two 16 gigs will be awesome!
 
I would hope that 16 Gigs will drop to the $650 price range.

The cost to the manufacturer of the P2 cards for 4Gig chips should only be around $50-$70 right now.

Plus, there has been a lot of action in the fabs making these.

Intel might even be selling off it's Ireland "Flash" fabs because it has grown so large.

Who knows????

Panasonic has the upper hand because of he proprietary interface.
 
16gb's will drop to the $650 price range. That's how it works. Probably by the end of 2007.

The cost to the manufacturer of the P2 cards for 4Gig chips should only be around $50-$70 right now.
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What makes you say that? Do you have some inside info on Panasonic's manufacturing process, or on the internals of how P2 cards work? You do realize there's a microprocessor and RAID controller and all sorts of other stuff in there, right? It's not just a shell with four cheap SD cards in it!
 
Here here!
The name is what is implies - a Professional Plugin Media
and i am chomping at the bit for a 16GB card
Im jealous of the Grass Valley Cam
just found out you can do simulatneous recording with the RevPro drive and 2 compact flash slots
 
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I don't understand the marketing logic of the p2 pricing. If they are able to make 16 or even 32 gig cards for about 500 bucks, why not do it now. read through these forums and the most comon reason buyers go for their competing cameras is the price of p2's. why not make them affordable and take over the camera market completely. This seems insane to me, they create this wonder-camera that gives us just about everything everyone ever wanted in a camera except for one of the most important things, a practical way to shoot more than a few minutes at a time. Yeah Yeah I know, some of you are gonna say, " but think of it as film and changing reels, and I have an assistant that changes the p2 cards" That is total nonsense, we've finally saved all this money on a mini varicam but now have to hire an assistant because of an impractical workflow. It's as if they finally made a mercedes affordable to us poor people but gave it a gas tank that only holds a quart.
I know it sounds like I"m whining, but I'm not, I sincerely don't understand the marketing rationale. Panasonic must know they could take over the entire under 10k camera market if they made cheaper bigger cards.
 
Anomolee said:
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(1143)-SDDR-64-SanDisk_Ultra_PC_Card_Adapter.aspx
+
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(1856)-SDCFX3-8192-SanDisk_Extreme_III_CompactFlash_8GB.aspx
+
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C7844/

<cough>

What would it take to fund a project like this?
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Oh trust me, I'm nagging them right now, endlessly. I think adding AVC-HD to a future version of the HVX is a brilliant idea. I can understand them wanting to add AVC-Intra, and I think that's great (double the recording time instantly, and intraframe for no GOP motion issues or editing hassles), but I'm pushing hard to get AVC-Intra to the P2 card, and AVC-HD to the SD card. AVC-HD may not be ideal, but heck, it's several steps up from HDV, and I bet it would be good enough for lots of purposes, and you'd get 5x as much recording time per gig.

I don't know if we'll get it; the HVX is from Panasonic's professional products group, and as a group they really don't like the idea of long-GOP codecs. But hey, a guy can nag, right?
 
Scrappy said:
I don't understand the marketing logic of the p2 pricing. If they are able to make 16 or even 32 gig cards for about 500 bucks, why not do it now.
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And that should give you your answer right there.

Because it's not possible. Otherwise, they would. They've cut the price of the 4GB card to 25% of what it was when it was introduced. The 8gb card has already been cut in half. They're doing what they can.

why not make them affordable and take over the camera market completely. This seems insane to me,
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And there's the rub. Because you're basing your speculation on erroneous data. You're comparing a P2 card to the underlying costs of an SD card, and that just isn't what's going on. The P2 cards are made from the premium top-of-the-line SD cards, and then they have a RAID controller and a microprocessor and all sorts of other stuff in there. It's not just four lousy cheap off-the-shelf SD cards.

I know it sounds like I"m whining, but I'm not, I sincerely don't understand the marketing rationale. Panasonic must know they could take over the entire under 10k camera market if they made cheaper bigger cards.
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Of course they know that. And that's exactly the goal they're working towards. It's just gonna take time for the costs to come down.

And hey, if anyone out there can make cheaper cards now, they're certainly welcome to. If it truly was a case of Panasonic charging $1400 for something that someone else could sell profitably at $500, don't you think those other companies would step up and get in the game? It is a free market economy out there, driven by competition. As soon as other companies see a way to make a buck off this whole process, they'll jump in. But right now the cards cost what they cost.
 
I'm not an expert on electronic manufacturing but I do recognize its deflationary trend and can infer manufacturing cost of one object to another comparably sophisticated object. Example, for the price of an 8 gig card you can get a seriously decked out laptop with processors, hard drives, lcd screen, sound card, power supply, dvd burners, software and on and on and on. I don't believe there is any more sophistication in the p2 card than the laptop, and it would be very hard to believe it cost more to manufacture a p2 card than a laptop. I do understand laptops sell in much greater volumes and that brings down costs. Panasonic has a factory set up now that makes the cards, the R and D is done. That's where I believe the productions cost was. I can understand why competitors hesitate on jumping in the market. They would have to tool up a factory that would be costly without any guarantee on how long Panasonic will keep using p2 or at what price they would keep selling them at. Again I am just making assumptions from ignorance of electronic manufacturing and am in no position to give the creators of the dvx100 and hvx200 lessons on how to run their business.
 
Yes, but how many of those laptops are they going to sell? There's a massive economy of scale issue being discounted.

Toshiba will probably sell 10x as many laptops in a week as Panasonic will sell P2 cards in five years. That has an enormous effect on pricing.

The P2 cards are engineered around existing technology specifically in order to take advantage of price drops. As SD card prices fall (and they are plummeting all the time), P2 card prices fall (witness three price reductions within six months). While P2 cards will never reach "mass" quantities, SD cards are already there. So they can leverage the enormous success of SD card sales and take advantage of those price drops. But the physical manufacturing and the cases and the low-product-run LSIs, those costs aren't going to see the big economy-of-scale drops that the SD cards will.

In some ways it's like a restaurant -- when you order a $15 meal, how much of that actual cost is the food itself? a dollar maybe? All the rest is labor and rent and taxes and utilities and all that stuff. So if the cost of your core ingredients (the food itself) were to drop by 50%, how much would that affect your restaurant check? Maybe 50 cents? I think that's the situation we're in with the P2 cards.

And don't forget: if you don't like P2 prices, you don't have to use it. There are alternatives -- there's the firestore, there's direct-to-computer capture, there's the forthcoming CinePorter.

If Panasonic can't make them for competitive prices, they'll find themselves not selling any product.

The point is, nobody wins if the cards are kept at artificially inflated prices. That would just be stupid. They will *never* sell enough volume to have the P2 card business ever amount to more than a pimple on the bottom line of Matsushita Heavy Industries (the parent company). This isn't some big massive profit center for them. If they were gouging the customer, the customer wouldn't buy. Simple as that.

There is a company that does what you're talking about -- one that insists on making proprietary formats, and insists on those formats using media that only they create and only they control. And their goal is to screw you over in every possible way, once they have you totally committed to their product. That company ain't Panasonic. Panasonic opens up their products and lets you have alternatives. P2 is an option, not a requirement. They are in fact the chief supplier of the alternative to P2: Panasonic is the reseller for the FireStore. And there will be other products that are completely unrelated to Panasonic: the CinePorter, and nNovia, and DVC Rack, to name three.

I'm all for lower card prices. Point is, so's Panasonic. They know very well that mass adoption of their technology would pay incredible dividends. The sooner people put tape and optical disc in their past, the sooner Panasonic becomes the leading supplier of all broadcast and consumer video equipment. They know this all too well.

I just don't go for the whole "big corporation conspiracy price gouging let's storm the castle with pitchforks" mentality that seems to pop up all around the web. Jan's already gone on record saying something like that if you can engineer the cards for less (and still meet their performance & reliability standards), she'll buy a thousand pieces right now. They want cheaper cards as soon as they can possibly get them.

I just wish Sandisk or Lexar or Kingston or someone like that would jump in. Competition would help the consumer. Panasonic may be making best efforts to get the price down, but nothing drives down prices like competition. As soon as some other company sees enough of a window of opportunity, that'll happen. Until that happens, I can only assume that that means there *isn't* a lot of price gouging going on, and there isn't any big margin for someone to swoop in and undercut them by enormous amounts. Because if there was, they'd do it.
 
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Barry_Green said:
16gb's will drop to the $650 price range. That's how it works. Probably by the end of 2007.


What makes you say that? Do you have some inside info on Panasonic's manufacturing process, or on the internals of how P2 cards work? You do realize there's a microprocessor and RAID controller and all sorts of other stuff in there, right? It's not just a shell with four cheap SD cards in it!
Click to expand...

Whoa Tiger! :-)

Yes, I am fully aware that the P2 card is composed of a purpose built chip, raid controller, the secure digital cards, and casing. In fact there is a blow out schematic of the P2 floating around somewhere.

Panasonic (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.), SanDisk and Toshiba are the biggest manufacturers of Secure Digital and form the backbone of the SD Association.

Retail Street prices for 4GB High Speed Secure Digital Cards are only $150 or so.

If you figure 25% of that price is retail mark up and 25% is wholesale mark up that leaves 50% of the price going to the manufacturer. Some profit some cost.

I would think that Panasonic is using Matsushita’s chips but you never know. This is all being very generous in favor of higher manufacturer cost to Panasonic so I am extremely confident that the internal SD conservatively only cost $50 - $70 bucks.

Currently we have a 4GB P2 card pricing out at what? $545.00 and dropping?

Lest pretend for a moment that Panasonic makes the P2 cards merely out of the goodness of their heart. Just for the love of it! ;-)

Let’s go with your premise that they are using extremely expensive secure digital cards. Maybe they even have to pay full retail per 1 Gig card.

That would be around $50 bucks per High Speed Secure Digital card. That leaves $345 for the cost of the “microprocessor and RAID controller and all sorts of other stuff in there”.

Fair enough!

4 x 4 GB HS SD ($70) = $280 for memory + $345 = $625

Golly Geepers!!!

That’s $25 dollars cheaper than I was even hoping for!

Again, we’ll see what Panasonic prices these at and how the pricing changes as available capacity changes.

The reason why the P2 cards are so expensive is basic economics.

There was considerable expense in engineering them and Panasonic controls the entire market.

They have a Monopoly.

This is not an evil Monopoly, merely a Natural one.

As Panasonic feels pressure from hard disk drive and other solid state recording mediums there will be a downward pressure on the price of P2 cards.

Panasonic will also take advantage of the commoditization of High Speed Secure Digital and increase capacity and lower the price per Gig as the market dictates to stay competitive.

Panasonic makes an incredible product and the market place is rewarding them for their genius and hard work!

I have noooo problem whatsoever with Panasonic making a profit.

I absolutely hope and pray they do so they continue product development and keep bringing us incredible gems such as the HVX.
 
Barry_Green said:
Yes, but how many of those laptops are they going to sell? There's a massive economy of scale issue being discounted.

Toshiba will probably sell 10x as many laptops in a week as Panasonic will sell P2 cards in five years. That has an enormous effect on pricing.

The P2 cards are engineered around existing technology specifically in order to take advantage of price drops. As SD card prices fall (and they are plummeting all the time), P2 card prices fall (witness three price reductions within six months). While P2 cards will never reach "mass" quantities, SD cards are already there. So they can leverage the enormous success of SD card sales and take advantage of those price drops. But the physical manufacturing and the cases and the low-product-run LSIs, those costs aren't going to see the big economy-of-scale drops that the SD cards will.

In some ways it's like a restaurant -- when you order a $15 meal, how much of that actual cost is the food itself? a dollar maybe? All the rest is labor and rent and taxes and utilities and all that stuff. So if the cost of your core ingredients (the food itself) were to drop by 50%, how much would that affect your restaurant check? Maybe 50 cents? I think that's the situation we're in with the P2 cards.

And don't forget: if you don't like P2 prices, you don't have to use it. There are alternatives -- there's the firestore, there's direct-to-computer capture, there's the forthcoming CinePorter.

If Panasonic can't make them for competitive prices, they'll find themselves not selling any product.

The point is, nobody wins if the cards are kept at artificially inflated prices. That would just be stupid. They will *never* sell enough volume to have the P2 card business ever amount to more than a pimple on the bottom line of Matsushi*a Heavy Industries (the parent company). This isn't some big massive profit center for them. If they were gouging the customer, the customer wouldn't buy. Simple as that.

There is a company that does what you're talking about -- one that insists on making proprietary formats, and insists on those formats using media that only they create and only they control. And their goal is to screw you over in every possible way, once they have you totally committed to their product. That company ain't Panasonic. Panasonic opens up their products and lets you have alternatives. P2 is an option, not a requirement. They are in fact the chief supplier of the alternative to P2: Panasonic is the reseller for the FireStore. And there will be other products that are completely unrelated to Panasonic: the CinePorter, and nNovia, and DVC Rack, to name three.

I'm all for lower card prices. Point is, so's Panasonic. They know very well that mass adoption of their technology would pay incredible dividends. The sooner people put tape and optical disc in their past, the sooner Panasonic becomes the leading supplier of all broadcast and consumer video equipment. They know this all too well.

I just don't go for the whole "big corporation conspiracy price gouging let's storm the castle with pitchforks" mentality that seems to pop up all around the web. Jan's already gone on record saying something like that if you can engineer the cards for less (and still meet their performance & reliability standards), she'll buy a thousand pieces right now. They want cheaper cards as soon as they can possibly get them.

I just wish Sandisk or Lexar or Kingston or someone like that would jump in. Competition would help the consumer. Panasonic may be making best efforts to get the price down, but nothing drives down prices like competition. As soon as some other company sees enough of a window of opportunity, that'll happen. Until that happens, I can only assume that that means there *isn't* a lot of price gouging going on, and there isn't any big margin for someone to swoop in and undercut them by enormous amounts. Because if there was, they'd do it.
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Exactly!!!!

I hope my post that sort of started this thing didn't give the impression to anyone that I think Panasonic is doing anything other than working hard to put the very best equipment that they humanly can into our hot little hands for what the market will bear!

They are absolutely not gouging!

It is simple market economics.

Panasonic took all the risk to move into solid state recording for us.

They deserve nothing but props and continued market place success!

The whole point of my post is that the cost to manufacture the P2 cards should be rapidly dropping in the next few months because of significant increases in global SD production.
 
SD cards are getting silly cheap, that's for sure. And hopefully that will contribute to major price drops in the P2 cards.

Let's keep in mind also that we're comparing discounted mass-marketer wholesale pricing against P2 card retail pricing. Panasonic isn't getting $550 per card, they're giving their dealers some margin in there too, probably around 30% or so, so that puts Panasonic's actual receipts at maybe $400. Now, Panasonic has to make their profit in there somewhere, maybe another 30%, so that puts the cost of goods & labor & shipping & warehousing & everything else at maybe $280, who knows.

I should explain that I'm probably responding to more than what's been said in this thread too. This is a subject that's come up so many times, usually a lot more hostile-ly than this thread has taken. I mean, I understand where people are coming from, but I don't understand why they think that 1+1 = 2 and that's all there is to it. It's like... well, like this: it's like they get a price quote for 1,000 DVDs in Amaray cases. Comes out to maybe $1.37 per disc, so they figure: HOLLYWOOD IS RIPPING US OFF:nads: ! HOW COME MOVIES COST $19.99 WHEN A DVD ONLY COSTS $1.37? PLUS THEY GET BIG DISCOUNTS!!! MOVIES ON DVD SHOULDN'T COST ANY MORE THAN MAYBE 80 CENTS, ANYTHING HIGHER THAN THAT IS JUST A RIPOFF!#@!!#$! :kali:

That just isn't how things work. The raw cost of goods is rarely an indicator of what the final product costs.

So I apologize if I went overboard in my explanations, like I said I feel like I'm answering six months of questions when I probably should just stick to the specific question in this specific thread.
 
No worries Barry!

You're a very busy man and I'm sure you get it from all sides, coming and going!

Panasonic seems to be keeping right up with the market and will no doubt continue to do so.

I hope the Cineporter is a success but there is so much to be said about the advantages of P2 Cards that as the prices moderate I would expect even the naysayers to pick up a card or two.

If you look at Panasonic's pricing they are way ahead of most trends.

Just look at the pricing of dual DVDs.

They've been around for a while and their prices have just stagnated.

Panasonic seems to be getting it right with the HVX.

Everything from P2 price drops to Jan's responsiveness to customer needs.

Pretty spectacular.

Sets the bar very high!
 
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