And I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm appreciating you're just reporting the Panasonic line. But if they are saying the Varicam enables a better workflow than their competitors - then again, just how? It just seems they are emphasising how good some things are (which may be true) - but ignoring that their competitors are doing the same. That line of marketing may work at the lower end of the market, but is likely to be counter-productive here for the reasons you give - "a customer in the Varicam price range would know not only specs of every camera out there". If it really does give significant workflow advantages, then what are they? All I've heard to date indicates how it more or less matches it's competition - not surpasses.
Even that wouldn't matter if the pricing was lower, or even equal. As it stands, it just looks bad value for money.
I know what you're saying, but it fits around a model for a company that are first to market with a revolutionary product that people are prepared to pay a bit over the odds for at the start. Once that market is filled, and once competition starts to arrive, you keep it competitive with price reductions. (And yes, selectively reducing the prices of parts of the system, better still.)
But it's not what we're talking about here. Red probably set the going initially as far as s35 and 4k, and RAW suited their initial customers. Sony and Canon extended it with such as the F5/55 and the C300, and in camera codecs for 4k with the F55. Panasonic are playing catchup - they're at least a couple of years late. They've admitted they got strategy wrong by not embracing s35/4k much earlier, and whilst I think everybody is agreed that they're now on the right track, it's far too late to price your entry product high, far too late for the early adopters. It just gets compared to what's already out there - and people just think "poor value for money".
I wouldn't underestimate the cost of initial high tech R&D, and that's especially true for sensor chips.
Any manufacturer has got to think how to recoup that - before even thinking about any profit! - and the classic ways are to start off with a higher price (and let early adopters pay that) and to try to take advantage of economies of scale by using the same chip across a range of product. That's exactly what Sony have done with the F5 chip, also using it in the FS7 and FS700. It should benefit everyone - higher end users by lower prices due to the economies of scale, lower end users by getting a higher quality chipset than they may otherwise expect.
But to make the strategy work, you've got to be in at the start, and really need a headstart of some months without competition.
The alternative is just go for the mass market, make use of existing tech, and price low. That's what we've seen such as AJA and Black Magic try and do.
