..So Sony loses twice?

I think that much of this discussion misses the point. I shoot stills as well as writing and producing film and video. In the stills world, Canon and Nikon are arguably the biggest players in prosumer and professional equipment. Ever since the introduction of the 10D, Canon has been the acknowledged technological leader in digital still imaging. Recently they introduced the 5D, which is garnering rave reviews and providing Canon with yet another winning product - both with buyers and in the all-important technical press.
I think that Panasonic surged ahead of the video field with the DVX100 and 100a in much the same way that Canon did with the 10D. And the HVX200 is such a startling technological leap forward that it will keep the competitors scratching their heads and burning the midnight oil in their design departments for the forseeable future.
Sony will sell their products, so will JVC, so will everyone else - but Panasonic will get a huge boost with their reputation for being on the cutting edge of technology. It will spread throughout their product line, and the professional buyer with deep pockets will read the great press about the HVX200 and consider some of Panasonic's other high- end cameras and equipment. It's all about public perception, and right now Panasonic is holding all the cards...
 
i agree with filmkid. i am right now in the market for a stillcam and looked at my options: from the Canon 20D oder their 350XT, Nikons D70 etc down to Panasonics FZ 20. Sony in video like Canon in photgraphy are very smart in creating the products the users want now. they don´t give you more, but exactly what you want.
Someone said: they want HD! so a SONY technician found the cheapest way to make HD happen: a miniDV tapedeck and a souped up VX2000. throw in a few gadgets and make sure the glass is decent....done. Throw the bones to the market.

Panasonic makes another product-development. IMO they have superior engineers or at least give them more freedom to create what they think is doable rather than what the user wants right now. had you asked a carowner 100 years ago what he would need parking assistance for he would have scratched his head. but now we have it. and Panasonic has technicians that go that route and then combined with a very smart marketing crew that then finds out what the user wants with those new features they create good cutting edge technology.
BMW is another company that goes that way while Volkswagen makes what we want now, BMW makes what you didn´t even dream of.
In the still-market Panasonic again surprised me. there FZ series is not the best on paper. SONY makes 10 megapixel cams that win in the studioshootouts. but Panasonic makes a cam with superior imagestabilizers and a noisier image to allow for more sensitivity and detail. in the test they lose, because you don´t need OIS shooting at the charts. but in real life you are not at ISO 400 but ISO 100 with that stabilizer. so while SONY sells with a clean image that might be shaky and still needs photoshop the Panasonic gives you a crystal clear shot with a little noise that is not seen in prints anyway. Panasonic makes products for us now and it is great to see how far they have come recently. BTW i am not working for Panasonic, but like what I get from them these days.

I don´t think the HVX wants to match FX1 sales. It might not even be considered to fight the Z1. those are clearly consumer and enthusiastic consumer cams.
the HVX digs into the higher markets IMO. DV50 4:2:2 alone is worth the money on that cam for many professionals (even without the shouldermount). the steep mountain for Panasonic is not the camera, but P2. if they are able to convince their clients that by not giving them what they want, but what is technically possible will bring benefits to the producers (practically save time and money) then this will be a golden cashcow. If P2 (and firestore) stumble over horrorstories of lost footage without tapebackups then the HVX will be history soon and the HVX300 will have a HDV deck or some other backup-tape. I wish us all good luck with P2, because then Panasonic might have thrown the touchdown.
 
filmkid said:
Sony will sell their products, so will JVC, so will everyone else - but Panasonic will get a huge boost with their reputation for being on the cutting edge of technology. It will spread throughout their product line, and the professional buyer with deep pockets will read the great press about the HVX200 and consider some of Panasonic's other high- end cameras and equipment. It's all about public perception, and right now Panasonic is holding all the cards...
Click to expand...

Well it is hard to see in the future isnt it? And there are much more cards in the game. As you know the Thompson Infinty is also using flash and removable Iomega, Ikegami did it with HD for years now, so 'edging technology' is not something that Panasonic is different from other vendors. Reputation only will not sell.
 
I agree with alpi69 that the p2 card is the big issue. They need to be a lot cheaper. I don't like the idea of dumping all the video in a hard drive and hoping that it doesn't get lost.

When I take pictures at a wedding or other event I keep all the pictures on the compactflash card until CD's and prints are made. Compactflash cards are cheap enough to do that.

I think Panasonic is on to something really, really good but the P2 will have to come down in price.

So your going to see good sales at first then drop untill the price of the P2 comes down.
 
One thing everyone on this forum tends to forget: Panasonic is 98% a CONSUMER company. The size of their boadcast business is more of a hobby nature when compared with the numbers they crunch in plasma, stereo, car audio and products you've never imagined they manufacture for the japanese market: kitchens, intelligent rubbish bins etc. (this is only half joke, though). The good thing about the broadcast products is the profits they make, about 10 times more per unit sold when compared with the consumer products. This is true for all - Sony, Canon and everyone else. I think the P2 concept is great, however same performance can be acheived using CF cards, which are about 5 times cheaper for the same capacity. Claimed speeds are fairytale stories - in ideal conditions the content of a P2 card can be dumped at a little faster than real time for DVCPRO100 because of too many bottlenecks (USB2, PCI bus, hard drives etc). Same results can be easily acheived using CF. Technology changes very quicly these days, there are all sorts of new things in the pipe: holographic storage, nanotubes and many other very secret things. P2 will not be around for too long, it's simply too expensive and too complex and depends too much on consumer-oriented IT infrastructure which has lower performance. If you can afford a super computer which will unleash the full speed of P2, then you probably afford a much better camera than the HVX. A good argument about the price of P2 cards is the fact that EVERYONE on this forum who plans to buy a new HVX wants to buy a Firestore drive or some other not-P2 recording solution. Panasonic created HVX to promote P2 concept but it seems it didn't worked as they were expecting. They have made a wonderful prosumer camera which will be very hard to tell apart from very expensive 2/3" HD cameras if used properly, but they failed in promoting the most expensive media on the market. I'm using media, even if this word gives goosebumps to Panny sales people. P2 IS media. Sort-term type, but it is no different as scope from a tape. Of course it has huge advantages over tape and other types of moving devices (discs, HDDs), but it is way too expensive to get on the market in this form. As I said, CF is much cheaper and P2 cannot be made much cheaper than it is for obvious reasons (SD cards must be sorted for error-free and speed, the LSI raid controller, the body etc).
 
Well, to each his own. CF may or may not be able to be made to work, cheaper, etc -- but the HVX doesn't use it. It uses P2 cards. Or FireStores, or CinePorters, or HD Rack, or laptop capture, or -- well, who knows what else will come down the pike. P2 is what it is, and it's an available option. And it is not the only option. You don't have to like it if you don't want to, you don't have to use it if you don't want to. Some of us have used it and think it's a fantastic system for what it's suitable for.

Whether the HVX was engineered to sell P2 (a position I strongly doubt) or whether the HVX came about at all because of the existence of P2 (the position I believe to be accurate, especially since P2's been on the market for about 18 months now), I'm just glad it's here.

P2 will never sell in mass quantities. Panasonic knows that. They don't expect it to. They'll probably move, at most, three or four cards per camera. It won't be like XDCAM, which is not reusable, specifically because P2 *is* reusable. It won't be like tape, which is disposable, because P2 cards aren't cheap (and therefore disposable). That isn't what it's meant to be, and it won't be. And -- you know what? It doesn't really matter. Because there are many ways to record with an HVX, and there will be more. Someday maybe somebody'll make a P2-to-CF adapter, so people could use off-the-shelf CF cards. It won't matter. HVXs will sell because they do what they do, and they do things that no other camera is even thinking about yet. P2 is just one way to record on it. And it's a very interesting technology, whether you can engineer something similar or not -- just the very existence of it has given us a multiple-format, multiple-frame-rate, multiple-resolution camera like the HVX. That's cool.
 
1300 for 2 4GBs is not too expensive IMO anyway.
I have used BetacamSP for our 4:2:2 broadcast programmes (and often the DVX when no one was looking hehe) and charged € 23 per 30 minute tape. Often you would use 5-8 tapes per day on an event. Not because they were full, but because we swapped tapes for different eventparts (ladies qualification tape 1, men quali tape 2, ladies semis tape 3, men semis tape 4, etc) to allow for quick editing.
It costed me 70-80 per day and the client over 100 per day.
with the HVX I will add two firewire HDDs to my gear instead and charge 100 more for equipment. It saves the customer money and me hassle and weight (Betatapes are bzulky and heavy in big numbers). So in 13 days my 4GB cards will be paid for. Ok, realistically I might have to add a 3rd one once we shoot these things in 1080, but for DV50 two will be enough and for non-events even more so.

I know this example is not working for all here, but it shows what Panasonic had in mind with it IMO. Shooting a wedding alone might become a problem, but if you have an assistant with you or got shooting breaks the P2 solution will be priceless when it comes to speed and convenience.
 
I don't think the HVX200 will do well due to the P2 chip format. It's just not practical for run and gun operations which I theorize make up the majority of the prosumer market. I bought a dvrack about 7 months ago and I sold it...because it was just not practical to carry around a laptop in the T.V. work I was doing. Hopefully the HVX200a will include an output to HDV tape in addition to P2 acquisition. When this happens, the camera will probably be the clear-cut winner.
 
eddavid, the Firestore or the Cineporter will be helpful in run and gun situations, the P2 store also. Also bigger P2 cards are coming.

But what this camera is a godsend for is obviously the filmmaking crowd. And who in that crowd would want HDV when they could get DVCPRO-HD 4:2:2 goodness?

Anyway this topic has been beaten to death so many times it's just a bloody pulp on the ground.
 
It will be good PR for Panasonic when good indie movies are made with the HVX and it is published that it is the HVX and Panasonic that are responsible for making such a contribution to the arts, and the entertainment world, and various broadcast situations.
 
Barry_Green said:
Well, to each his own. CF may or may not be able to be made to work, cheaper, etc -- but the HVX doesn't use it. It uses P2 cards. ......................... Some of us have used it and think it's a fantastic system for what it's suitable for.
Click to expand...
Barry, I have also used it (with 2/3" SD cameras) and do agree with that last sentence. But in a way that's the problem. What it's suitable for (AT THE MOMENT) is a minority of production. In my usage I was initially impressed with many aspects (still am) : the ability to load into an edit computer by putting cards into the PCMCIA slot, the splitting of material into individual shots, low power consumption of the camera, and others.

But later on, one shoot looked like turning at the last minute into one which somebody else would edit. On tape, easy. On P2 - I can't just hand over my cards! Yes, there may be ways round the problem, but they complicate the workflow - surely new technology should make life easier? For some P2 may well offer far more advantages than disadvantages now, I won't deny that, but I'll maintain that they will be in a minority until solid state mamory becomes affordable enough to be considered consumable.

I think the points made by others about Compact Flash are extremely valid. If it is 1/5 the price of P2, and can handle the data rates required, then I don't think "to each his own" is an adequate response. We should all be saying "why are you making us use a solution that is 5x dearer than it needs to be?" You also say: "P2 cards aren't cheap (and therefore disposable). That isn't what it's meant to be, and it won't be. And -- you know what? It doesn't really matter."

Sorry, but it does. Not to you maybe, not to other people with comparable workflows, but it does to me, it does to my colleagues, and it does to countless other cameramen whose workflows are more like mine than yours. And I think it does to Panasonic if other manufacturers start bringing out product based on CF, with all the advantages of solid state, but without the price penalty of P2. If the HVX came about because "P2's been on the market for about 18 months now" then well, CF's been around a lot longer than that.

My trial experiences made me keen for the day when solid state is the norm. I don't think brushing valid criticism under the carpet is in any consumers interest.
 
It's not "brushing valid criticism under the carpet", it's that the product they're asking for doesn't exist. And Panasonic certainly isn't going to revamp their entire P2 strategy to make it exist. So why gripe about it? If someone makes a compactflash adapter that works, fantastic -- we'll all be glad to use it. I would LOVE to see someone develop a CheaP2 sort of card where you could put a Sandisk Extreme III off-the-shelf compactflash card in a PCMCIA holder and slide it into the camera. That would be phenomenal. It would also be even better for DV50 or straight DV shooters, because you wouldn't have to pay the premium for ultrafast cards -- an UltraII would easily handle DV50, and a regular CF card should be enough for DV. Will it work? Maybe. I hope so. Will someone make it? Maybe. I hope so. Will Panasonic produce it? Not a chance.

What I'm saying is: the HVX doesn't have that capability. It's not going to happen from Panasonic. People may think that CF would have been the better choice, or cheaper, or whatever -- but it's not reality. It doesn't exist yet. And it's not going to change. So why harp on it? Continuing to complain about it is not going to change anything, and doesn't really help anyone come to grips with what actually is available: just like it isn't helpful to gripe "why oh why doesn't the Z1 record on HDCAM SR?" It doesn't. It's not going to. It's not reality. If you want HDCAM SR, the Z1 isn't going to do it, no matter how many people ask for it.

I'm pointing out that a P2 card isn't a cheap compactflash system, nor will it ever be. Would we all want there to be such a cheap system available? Of course. I am actively hoping that someone will develop it. But at some point you have to recognize what the tool is, and what it isn't, and then make your decision based on what it IS rather than what you or someone else thinks it should have been, right?
 
Barry_Green said:
Panasonic certainly isn't going to revamp their entire P2 strategy to make it exist. So why gripe about it?
Click to expand...
Do I really have to answer that? Well, why should consumers have to pay 5x as much for memory as they may need to? Why should the inevitable move to solid state as a general media be delayed by unnecessarily high memory costs? Does the situation benefit Panasonic or consumers?

I don't think comparing this to "why oh why doesn't the Z1 record on HDCAM SR?" is at all valid. Whilst a request such as that would obviously be prohibitively expensive, and have powering and all sorts of other implications, a request for CF as opposed to P2 may not mean much more than changing a slot and edge connector. Far more reasonable, surely?
Barry_Green said:
People may think that CF would have been the better choice, or cheaper, or whatever -- but it's not reality. It doesn't exist yet. And it's not going to change. So why harp on it? Continuing to complain about it is not going to change anything, and doesn't really help anyone come to grips with what actually is available: just like it isn't helpful to gripe "why oh C" It doesn't. It's not going to. It's not reality.?
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Why should we harp on about it? It may not be reality, but perhaps it should be. And only by people raising such issues on forums such as this does change happen - hopefully for the better. I've no allegiances to any manufacturer - I think at the moment all offerings have their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps I and others will stop "continuing to complain" when valid concerns are recognised, rather than met with "well, that's the way it is". That doesn't help consumers.
 
The first time that CF card failed on you because it couldn't handle the DVC PRO HD footage or wasn't made to a certain specification, you would be dumping a load all over Panasonic for not having quality control or producing a product that didn't work or whatever.

It is what it is. They did what they did. Buy it or don't. Wait for something else. Shoot on 35mm. Wait for the Red Camera. There are plenty of other options our there for you.
 
baquajim said:
The first time that CF card failed on you ...........you would be dumping a load all over Panasonic for not having quality control or producing a product that didn't work or whatever.
Click to expand...
But would it fail? Why should it? It seems an extremely reliable medium for newspaper photographers who also require high data speeds when shooting high resolution stills at high frame rates. I've never heard of a reliability problem with CF, and the literature on the card in my DSLR would seem to indicate that it should be easily more than capable of video bitrates. In principle that would also seem to be true for HD if such as a 50Mb MPEG encoding system was used.
It is what it is. They did what they did. Buy it or don't. Wait for something else. Shoot on 35mm. Wait for the Red Camera. There are plenty of other options our there for you.
Click to expand...
Other options? 35mm suitable for short turn around projects? Will the Red Camera be a comparable price to the HVX or similar cameras!?! At the moment "wait for something else" does indeed seem to be the option to take. You may well be one of the people for whom P2 may work well now - good, but try to understand why that's not true for others.

But I'm not really saying "why didn't Panasonic make the HVX CF" anyway. Just agreeing with people who think that solid state needn't mean P2, whoever makes it.
 
Barry, great idea. P2 SD, P2 HD. Depending on the SD cards they use and their speed. Maybe it would make some of them even more affordable if they were just for SD work.

Pass it to Jan. No joke. :thumbsup:
 
Sony loses? Once? Twice?
Why do you care?

A lot of companies lose because of bad management. They haven't earned any sympathy from me...
 
I hate to see vegas go by the way side, I almost enjoyed editing for once. Maybe big red will step in and salvage sonic foundry when Sony starts selling off pieces.
 
harddrive said:
It may not be reality, but perhaps it should be. And only by people raising such issues on forums such as this does change happen - hopefully for the better. I've no allegiances to any manufacturer - I think at the moment all offerings have their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps I and others will stop "continuing to complain" when valid concerns are recognised, rather than met with "well, that's the way it is". That doesn't help consumers.
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Y'know what, harddrive? I agree with you 100%.

Yes we should be telling manufacturers what we want, and yes we should be telling them what we don't want. And yes, they should listen to us.

The only thing I'm saying is, at least for the HVX/P2, that time is long, long, long past. The thing will be on store shelves 12 days from now. It's extremely past the time when changes like that could happen.

I've always found that you can get anything in the world you want, if you just ask. The trick is that you have to ask someone who can actually give it to you. And ask them in a way that makes them want to give it to you.

I think there's a big difference between proactive solicitation of product developers, and what we see a lot of in forums which consists of griping or complaining. Let's take Focus and the FireStore as an example. I've been asking them publicly and privately for interchangeable hard disks. I sent them a huge missive which outlined exactly what the product should have, from the perspective of an event shooter. I explained specifically how important interchangeable hard disks would be, and while the currently-proposed FireStore is nice, it's not the product that we, event shooters, actually NEED. It'll fill some users' requests, but it does not satisfy the one that I and a lot of other guys need.

At DV Expo I got to talk to the head of Focus and the engineer/tech guy designing the FireStore. I launched into it again. And they told me (paraphrasing, to make the point): "We know. But it ain't gonna happen." They have zero interest in making an interchangeable hard disk product. They just aren't going to do it. The service and support issues, the public complaints that happen when an end user fouls up his system, all that kind of stuff has just soured them on the whole concept of interchangeable. They will not do it.

So I quit asking them. It's the only reasonable thing to do. I'm not going to go on a public forum and whine about it, or take them to task for it, or urge someone not to buy their product -- what good does that accomplish? They're not going to do it, they've been clear as to why, their reasons make sense, and they've made their decision.

So I shifted over to Spec-Comm and the CinePorter. I told them exactly the reasons why we need it. I talked to them at DV Expo as well, both Andrew and David. I outlined the case clearly, logically, and precisely.

And they said "We understand. But we're not gonna do it." (paraphrasing, of course). They have similar concerns, and they are going to design their product to a certain standard of reliability that they feel comfortable with, and interchangeable hard disks doesn't allow them to do that.

Am I disappointed? Of course. Will I continue to harp on them? Not a chance. I wish them well, I hope their product meets with success, but it in no way serves the need that I, and other event shooters have. So I will next start nagging nNovia.

So why harp about P2? It is what it is. It is exactly what it is. It is not a user-interchangeable-memory device, nor is it an independent flash card. Nor will it ever be. The company has spoken. They have designed their technology and they have put it on the market. They are not open to developing flash-based adapters. They will not do it.

So asking them over and over, and playing "squeaky wheel" in a public forum, is wasted breath and wasted energy. Instead, direct your efforts towards someplace where it might actually do some good. Where your question may be able to be answered favorably. Let's take the question to SanDisk, or Lexar, or Kingston, or PNY, or Crucial, or one of the many other memory makers. Let's tell THEM what we want. Let's ask them if they'll build it.

We may get a "yes" from them. So let's direct our energies towards the possible, rather than the already-closed-door. P2 is what it is, and it is not going to become something else. But other manufacturers could do it.

In fact, now that you've helped me think this through, there's an absolutely obvious answer here: Spec-Comm! They've already reverse-engineered the P2 card, they already have the technology available to them. THEY could develop a compactflash-to-PCMCIA adapter that would work in a P2 slot. So let's ask them if they will! That way we get what you're asking for, and we direct our energies where they'll do some good -- to someone who CAN say YES.
 
Barry_Green said:
In fact, now that you've helped me think this through, there's an absolutely obvious answer here: Spec-Comm! They've already reverse-engineered the P2 card, they already have the technology available to them. THEY could develop a compactflash-to-PCMCIA adapter that would work in a P2 slot.
Click to expand...
Good idea. I'd buy a Compact Flash to P2 adapter if it let me use a $700 8GB Compact Flash card in the HVX200. The adapter would need to be competitively priced, of course. At the current rate of an 8GB P2 Card ($2250) it shouldn't be difficult to make it competitively priced.
 
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