Would that be the "outdated and overpriced" P2 technology that's currently taken about 80% of the broadcast market worldwide?

Or the "overpriced" P2 technology that just got slashed in price to about 1/3 of what it was?

So, you'd rather pay $495 for a 16GB card (Red One's 16GB CompactFlash) than $420 for a 16GB P2 card?


Eh, point being: if you want commodity media recording, that's what AVCHD is for. Cheap recording on cheap media. If you want professional media, the P2 card is currently the cheapest and most adopted solid state media in the world, so don't expect to see it "outdated" any time soon.

Er, not exactly. There's already a hard limit between their consumer and professional camera lines, which is that they're from different companies! Panasonic Consumer is about 100x larger (wild guess) than Panasonic Broadcast. Panasonic Consumer doesn't have any "pro line" to protect, and I can pretty much guarantee you that if anyone from Panasonic Broadcast went over to Panasonic Consumer and said "hey, make that $1500 camera suck so that you won't compete with my $48,000 HPX3000" that the Panasonic Consumer guy would be all "um, drop dead and get the bleep out of my office."

Agreed. But the only "artificial limit" imposed on the GH1 is likely the price tag. If Broadcast were to roll out their own version, with a professional codec and live monitoring, it would undoubtedly cost more.

These companies cram in everything they can, while meeting a specific price target.

Look at the HPX300 -- you don't think that's cannibalizing the HPX500 and even the HPX2000? Of course it is. But the company's attitude (as is the attitude of any company that wants to stay in business) is, if the older product can't compete, screw it. Long live the new!

Says who? JVC *only* sells low-cost 1/3" cameras now (or smaller). They don't even bother with 1/2" or 2/3" anymore. And Panasonic just brought out the HPX300, which does about 85% of the job that the $40,000 cameras used to do, with a street price of around $8,000.

Times are changed.

Got a source on that statistic? Can't prove it where I live. Most broadcast outlets here are still using tape. Why? 'Cause it's ... ahem... cheap.

No, I'd rather pay $122 for a 16GB Class 6 SDHC Card than $800 for a 16GB P2 card. Or how about $250 for 32GB SDHC Card? Your prices are way out of whack. I sure can't find a P2 card for $400.

Try and find a modern laptop that still has a PCMCIA interface.

Should have clarified -- 80% of the market *that's gone tapeless.* You're right, there are still plenty of outlets that haven't converted over yet. ABC and NBC have been big holdouts, but NBC went all P2 recently, and ABC affiliates are converting over too. So far, according to Panasonic, 340+ stations in the USA have gone P2 (vs. Sony's claim of about 110 for XDCAM, including standard-def, high-def, and MPEG 422). All NBC owned & operated stations are committed to P2, as are all NBC-affiliated networks like Telemundo, CNBC, MSNBC, etc. All Fox owned & operated stations are exclusively P2, including Fox Network, Fox News, Fox Sports, and Fox Business. And according to Panasonic Europe, 85% of the broadcasters in Europe who've gone tapeless, have gone for the P2 system.

As far as "because it's cheap", you ain't kidding. NBC had a hand in designing the HPX300, which they're now using as their main news camera, and it costs around $8,000. The days of the $60,000 broadcast camera are gone.

The MSRP of the 16GB P2 "E" series card is $420. The 32GB card is $625 and the 64GB card is $998. My prices aren't "out of whack", they're the manufacturer's suggested retail price. Actual street price will likely be lower.

I pointed to the Red 16GB compactflash card because that's the only memory card out there that's of comparable size that's tasked with recording such a heavy-duty codec. And Red's CompactFlash card is custom-manufactured for them because no other CF card can handle it. And it costs *more* than a comparable-sized P2 card.

And a P2 card isn't just a memory card like an SDHC card. It's a complete microcomputer with a processor and its own firmware that handles data integrity checks, write verification, wear leveling, and file system management that protects the user from losing data if the power's pulled or the card's ejected. No other card does that. Even Sony's SxS card, the FAQs flat-out say "don't pull the card out while it's being read from or written or data may be destroyed". Pull a CF or SD card out while it's being accessed, and see what happens. Then try it with a P2 card and see what happens -- you might be surprised. You'll lose, at most, two seconds of footage and that's *it*.

Anyway, it's simple: if you want to record AVCHD, there are commodity SD cards available for that. If you want to record HDV, there are commodity CompactFlash cards available for that. If you want to record AVC-Intra, DVCPRO-HD, or AVC-Ultra, those require a P2 card.


Try and find a modern laptop that has a DV tape drive. Or an HDV tape drive. Or an XDCAM disc slot. Or any other type of video recording media that's ever been produced.

The form factor of the P2 card started with PCMCIA, which was convenient for the laptops of the day but it's hardly dependent on whether laptops have that slot! Every video format ever made has needed an "adapter" to be used with computers. Typically those "adapters" have been called DECKS, and have cost anywhere from $4,000 to $250,000. Nowadays you can directly plug in the PCMCIA card into some laptops like the Lenovo R series or any Panasonic Toughbook or just about any of the Fujitsu Lifebooks (and probably several more that I don't feel like spending time googling), or you can get an adapter (like the Duel adapter or the Addonics) for $69 to $119.

Or are you trying to assert that the 110,000 P2 cameras out there in the world are somehow not working? Seems like they're working just fine.

For good!!! ;-DD

Barry, much respect for you, but the HPX300 is 1/3" Cmos!!! May God give light to the ones buying it...

Many of the reasons for the P2 card's complicated engineering are holdovers from when flash memory media wasn't fast enough to handle HD video streams. That's no longer the case. Panasonic deserves a lot of credit for being first on the scene with a workable tapeless solution. But being first in an era of rapid technological change doesn't always mean best. These days, Panasonic's over-engineering of P2 is really just overkill. Look at what Convergent Designs or Red are doing with standard-issue SD or Compact Flash cards. They're handling very high-end video and audio streams with no need for the multiple redundancy or other features of P2. And it would no more occur to me to yank a memory card out of a running camera than it would to pull an HDV tape out of a camera while the drive motor is running.

I've always been really suspect of proprietary media. In my mind, it's just an excuse for companies to charge exorbitant prices for a captive audience. If I'm shooting a feature-length documentary in an out-of-the-way location, I don't want to have find a specialty dealer to get me an extra 30 minutes of shooting time. And what happens if the company goes in a different direction, and your specialized media is no longer available? Ask anyone who's ever used a mini-disk audio recorder.

As for the MSRP of P2 media, a quick check on the B&H site and others show that street prices are much closer to $800 per 16GB card. Maybe they'll come down soon, but at the moment, I couldn't buy the cards at the price you quote.

$409.95 Panasonic | P2 MEMORY CARD 16GB "E" | AJ-P2E016XG
$614.95 Panasonic | P2 MEMORY CARD 32GB "E" | AJ-P2E032XG
$979.95 Panasonic | P2 MEMORY CARD 64GB "E" | AJ-P2E064XG

They aren’t in stock yet.

Exactly!

An outdated memory technology and an obsolete bus. The development of AVC Intra 100 means Panasonic sees no need for more than 100Mbps. So why stay with P2 RAID?

There is no excuse for someone buying any product that doesn't use commodity media. You are simply giving a company money for nothing. $400 is crazy expensive for likely $10 worth of parts. And, god help you if you lose or damage a P2 card in other than a major USA city.

The decision by Panasonic to go P2 and to use SD chips in what they claimed were HD camcorders killed my belief in their interest in anything but maximizing their profit. And, their choice of AVC Intra 100 is a production killer when 100Mbps MPEG-2 can deliver the exact same quality as AVC 100 at this data rate. AVC Intra 100 is NOT 2X more efficient. It's not even 2X more efficient at 50Mbps. And, MPEG-2 can (and should) be edited natively with multiple real-time streams.

Of course, given that SDHC capacity has now grown so high -- there is no need for AVCHD. JVC has proven that SDHC can be used at 35Mbps which is more than enough for any of the camcorders using AVCHD or AVCCAM. Another buyer money wasting move that only serves the purpose of trying to sell more camcorders that offer no more quality than does HDV. Why Sony joined Panasonic in this move is beyond me. (And, both locked themselves into MAIN Profile.)

And, back to the GH1 -- not only does it only use MAIN Profile it uses a cell phone like version without B-frames which is nuts because B-frames are what makes 17Mbps compression acceptable. (And, why AVCHD when the camera only really works at 720p60 which matches AVCHD Lite?) In fact, why AVCHD at all when pure H.264/AVC works perfectly with all applications!

Very interesting discussion with lots of good points.
Let me add my point:
Having been in the pro audio world for over 35 years and having seen the technology leaps, I feel as if the same is happening with video now.

When I started in 1975 to learn sound engineering at Hansa Studios Berlin, it was a costly thing to produce a record, today most music sounds the same and is produced on some kids laptop with hard&software for maybe 2k$, and has the half life of a plastic shopping bag.

I see similar things happening to video.....at a faster pace but with the same results:

videos made on equipment for under 2k$ with the half life of a plastic bag.

A major factor in this is that people now have easy access to technology and don't necessarily have the drive or dedication to their art form to hone their skills before recording.

Prior to the invention of papyrus, our ancestors put a great deal of thought into what they committed to stone.

Today, young 'recording artists' learn how to do multiple takes and composites of vocals and guitar tracks in their home studios, but rarely develop the kind of musicianship that occurred when access to even such a rudimentary device as a tape deck was a rare occurrence.

The same is true of video and film.

The answer is to approach these new mediums with the discipline of those who came before us, and to hopefully not fall into a pattern of producing the musical or cinematic manifestation of fast food.

Sadly though, as technology pushes forward, tastes change, and the thirst of the general public for the likes of Doestoyevsky and Kurosawa is being replaced with salivation over tabloids, reality-tv and four minute youtube videos about wardrobe malfunction.

I finally had the chance to actually touch and test a RED and was very surprised to find a fully working piece of pro gear with incredible features and proprietary software, that works and is capable of stunning footage in the hands of a pro.
I am a happy owner of the GH1 and can see some surprises popping up in the near future regarding cmos cameras, but for now the RED and Canon MKII and GH1 are NOT comparable in any way IMO.

I can understand the dislike for the marketing of JJ but they deliver a functioning camera at the moment and sort of revolutionized the market, and maybe paved the way for what we are seeing now with the DSLR´s and in the future with other cameras.

As some of you know, Sony is coming out with a UMD less PSP this October with a built in battery. They claim it’s to help shrink the system but I bet it’s also to obviously prevent people from hacking the system like people been doing with a modified battery and memory stick on older PSP systems. You can have useful applications like watching YouTube videos but it can also allow you to steel games which is understandable for Sony deciding to have a battery built into their PSP Go.

In the case with Panasonic, their latest firmware upgrades for their cameras makes some of the features better but it’ll also prevent you from using third party batteries at least for now. Usually your safer using genuine batteries and yes there are some that are just as good but if anything were to happen to your camera, your warranty may get void if the company finds out. I view it like sending your car to an auto body shop and a mechanic tells you that a certain third party part works just as good. You just got to be careful.

Long story short, would hacking a GH1 be similar to hacking a PSP?. If so than I would assume Panasonic got worried when they heard about the 5D Mark II getting hacked. My GH1 has the latest firmware updates and I wouldn’t want to use a third party battery or hack the GH1 anyway but I’m dying to know.

Curious what you are talking about? What's the battery has to with hacking.

Just puts the words Pandora, PSP and Battery in your search. You may get an idea what I’m talking about.