Underwhelmed

The JVC HD1 was out in 2003, and the Sony FX1 was out in 2005...the JVC had 30P, the Sony was not progressive
If I'm not mistaken The Andromeda DVX was in a tie for being among the first options for owning a 24P prosumer "HD" camera, out in late 2005. The XLH1 was released in September of 2005, and of course the HVX 200 was released a couple of months later.
 
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Hmm, but is there a market? Is Panasonic clinging to a vanishing platform? Has the 2/3" camera, specifically in P2, ran its course?
I'm curious about that and I just posted a thread, in case anyone cares to give their opinion:


http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...2-format-obsolete&p=1986295180#post1986295180


I'm not trying to bash Panasonic. Like I say in my thread, I'm looking into getting back into P2 cameras, if it's a wise move.

Broadcast news and related stuff. My old TV station had almost two dozen P2 2/3" cameras. And that's how they were for all the stations corporate wide. They easily had nearly $1/2 million invested in P2 infrastructure at just my station. You might see more smaller stations going to 1/3" cameras like the HPX370, but P2 isn't going to go anywhere anytime soon... it's simply too costly to switch to a cheaper format once you've invested taht kind of money into the infrastructure. And after seeing some of the abuse some of those cameras took (like walking into the engineer shop and seeing one of the engineers trying to dry out and get all the sand out of a camera that fell in a flooding river when the photog got knocked in), I have a hard time seeing management want to go away from something less bulletproof as P2.
 
B&H has an inventory system that sometimes marks things as discontinued when they are not, in fact. I speculate that it's a category error or something. We've seen it before
 
crickets . . .

We´ll with the prototype last year, I´m pretty sure the crickets will be silenced by a big KABOOOOM! by Panasonic.
A smaller kaboom! following afterwards would be appreciated the most though, with an 2K AF500 or sth, since the 4K Varicam will probably be in the
F55/RED realm...
 
. . . the 4K Varicam will probably be in the F55/RED realm...
I really don't know why a large-sensor 4K Panasonic camera needs to be so expensive. They already demoed a 4K prosumer model at CES. Take the guts of that, add an Aptina 4K sensor, 3G-SDI, and Cineform RAW output. Make sure both HDMI is at least 12-bit and SDI is 10-bit. Should be doable for a lot less than $10K (the $400 Nikon V1 uses the sensor). My point is, the tech is there to do it both cheaply and well. The BMCC is proof of that -- it lacks only 4K capability, and that'll likely happen in the not-too-distant future.
 
I really don't know why a large-sensor 4K Panasonic camera needs to be so expensive. They already demoed a 4K prosumer model at CES. Take the guts of that, add an Aptina 4K sensor, 3G-SDI, and Cineform RAW output. Make sure both HDMI is at least 12-bit and SDI is 10-bit. Should be doable for a lot less than $10K (the $400 Nikon V1 uses the sensor). My point is, the tech is there to do it both cheaply and well. The BMCC is proof of that -- it lacks only 4K capability, and that'll likely happen in the not-too-distant future.

I agree with you it doesn't need to be so expensive, but it will be. Most large sensor and/or 4K video cameras are expensive...so Panasonic isn't going to try to make something which sells well below the market value. They may do it for less (since they always seem to be lower than comparable models from Sony and Canon...1/3" cams, the AF100, etc) but not by a huge amount.
The BMCC is often brought up as a means to compare, but it's a way different beast than what Sony and Panasonic put on the table. I believe a 4K large sensor Panasonic would have a full body with buttons, dials, switches, all sorts of different output options, deep menus and so on and so forth. It would be a middle/upper tier cinema product...not the simplified style and price point of a BMCC or DBolex for that matter.
I think the GH4 will be a 4K camera in that "entry level" realm...but I'm just guessing along the curve the GH series have traveled upon....always ahead of conventional DSLRs on the video front.
 
Yeah, that looks a lot like the new Sony 4K cameras. Maybe Panasonic is afraid that RED will sue them also….:grin:
Modularity wasn't the issue. Red sued Sony over the latter's implementation of compressed raw. As far as I know, the 4K Varicam doesn't even have raw (which would be a shame, really).
 
and I don't think the 4k VariCam or whatever it's called will be cheap. More like F55 price range. My 2 cents
 
It means it comes standard with AVC-Intra100, and in the future you can upgrade it to the even higher-quality AVC-Intra200 codec. And that in their opinion, AVC-Intra200 is nearly uncompressed quality, at a data rate of around 200 megabits per second (for 720p or 1080i; for 1080/60p it'd be about 400 megabits per second).
 
They frequently do have something that they reserve to announce until the show itself. Typically all the big companies will hold a pre-NAB press conference; this is a holdover from the days when people actually cared about printed material (CES Daily, etc) so the magazines needed lead time to have the stories printed in the issues that they hand out at the show. Nowadays with instant dissemination of electronic information, it's far less vital. Even so, the tradition has been to hold something back for release on show day, so the pre-NAB press release package has rarely been "the whole story".

Hey, even in this age of instant electronic dissemination, writers still need time to write, and the editor has to look it over and it has to be scheduled for publishing!

Would love to finally hear something about the 4k varicam, and I'm interested in this small 4k camera that was mentioned as being at CES. It's the first I've heard of it, but Panasonic isn't great at getting the message out there. Sounds really interesting tho!

Freya
 
I was referring to instant dissemination of press releases. Yes, editorials and reviews and articles still take a lot of time to write and get right and fact-check, etc... but they can redistribute press releases instantly. In the "old days", you had to get the press releases in to the magazines in time for the print run and distribution...
 
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