The ecomomics of P2 Cards

[Dan Brockett]

Originally Posted by Bob Kerner

Makes the Sony solution look all the more appealing. I'm not trying to provoke a fight but this is what I was affraid of: that for the cost of a couple of media cards, you're on your way to the price of another camera.

Sony has 64 and 32GB cards? Hadn't heard that one. We are using the 16s in the EX1 at work.

Dan

[Ellis Kendrick]

Sony just started shipping its 32 GB cards. 64s are nowhere in sight...

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Ellis Kendrick

....... 64GB P2 cards should be on the shelves by Thanksgiving, and the price would be anywhere between $2200 and $2800.

Immediately after I read that, I saw Convergent Designs latest newsletter ( http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/convergen...ewsletter.html ) and one section stood out at me:

Transcend 133X 32GB Compact Flash cards drop below US $85, 64 and 100 GB cards Announced
The Transcend 133X 32GB CF card, which we have certified for data-rates up to 100 Mbps, is now available for under US $85. The price of this card has dropped from $230 to $85 in the last 15 months! ......

Microdia has announced a high-speed 64GB card, while Pretec has trumped everyone with a 64GB and 100 GB CF card; both due before the end of 2008. The price and density of CF cards should continue to drop and increase respectively for the foreseeable future. At this rate, CF cards will drop below the price of professional HD tape sometime in the next 6 months.

$85 for 32GB! And certified by CV for 100Mbs recording! That's well under 10% of the quoted price/GB for P2 cards.

Even more interesting is the observation about relative pricing versus pro HD tape. At this rate, the need to shoot and download is likely to rapidly go away, especially when saved time and cost of hard drives is factored in.

[Michael Kraus]

I may be misinterpreting this but....

can you just attach a 32gb compact flash card to a transcend CF to PCMCIA adapter and have a fully effective P2?

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Dan Brockett

Sony has 64 and 32GB cards? Hadn't heard that one.

Dan, I think by "Sony solution" Bob is referring to the SDHC card substitute for SxS which has become a popular discussion topic in our XDCAM EX forum. 64GB total is possible with that workaround via two 32GB SDHC cards. See http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/sony-xdca...sxs-cards.html for more details.

Originally Posted by Michael Kraus

can you just attach a 32gb compact flash card to a transcend CF to PCMCIA adapter and have a fully effective P2?

Nope, not that easy and it won't work, sorry. There's a lot more going on inside a P2 card than that. See http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/panasonic...stage-2-a.html and http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/panasonic...fferences.html for clarification.

[Michael Kraus]

Originally Posted by Chris Hurd

Nope, not that easy and it won't work, sorry. There's a lot more going on inside a P2 card than that. See http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/panasonic...stage-2-a.html and http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/panasonic...fferences.html for clarification.

Ha, yeah I didn't think so. Way too good to be true.

[Michael Chenoweth]

Originally Posted by David Heath

$85 for 32GB! And certified by CV for 100Mbs recording! That's well under 10% of the quoted price/GB for P2 cards.

Yes it is well under 10% of the price of P2 however at what cost do you get to the option of taking advantage of the CF card? It's a $3500 recorder.

So you buy a $3500 recorder and an $85 CF card to record to - You're sitting about 48+ gigs of P2. Tit for tat IMO.

Now... if you're looking at archiving to CF and you're just going to pop the card out and store it, not to reuse, then I can see the price benefits. I'd love to have movies delivered this way (Minority Report-ish)

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE that the Nanoflash option is out there for the Sony / Canon cams but nonetheless everything $$$-wise has to be taken into consideration.

[Tim Polster]

I respectfully disagree Michael.

P2 is selling for $50 per minute of 1080 or 720p60 shooting.

The full Flash XDR unit ($5,000) with four $85 CF cards will shoot 280 minutes of 50 Mbps 1080 or 720p60 footage.

This comes out to $19 per minute, and the codec is full raster, so you will actually get some more detail from the Panasonic cameras.

Plus, I like the idea of being able to afford to carry around spare cards just case one gets lost or stepped on or whatever.

The Flash XDR is a better value to me.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Michael Chenoweth

Yes it is well under 10% of the price of P2 however at what cost do you get to the option of taking advantage of the CF card? It's a $3500 recorder.

So you buy a $3500 recorder and an $85 CF card to record to - You're sitting about 48+ gigs of P2. Tit for tat IMO.

The quote about CF from the CV newsletter was intended to make a general point about memory pricing, rather than suggest it could be used in an adaptor to simulate a P2 card, or with the CV XDR specifically. Specifically, pricing of memory of performance at least high enough to record a 100Mbs data stream.

Until recently, if you wanted the undeniable benefits of solid state, you had to accept a workflow of shoot/download/wipe cards, and accept that it was not possible to simply pop out a tape, and hand it over to a client. Those were the undeniable drawbacks of solid state, and still are of P2.

Many of us are now looking to the next stage. Solid state at consumable prices. What might be seen as having your cake and eating it. Hence the relevance of the quote from Convergent Design: "At this rate, CF cards will drop below the price of professional HD tape sometime in the next 6 months.

Michael Chenoweths quote above is true enough if you only ever buy a single CF or P2 card, but even with the initial cost of the XDR, the significance is that once the 48GB break even point is reached, extra memory costs vastly less than with P2.

And we're starting to see cameras natively taking very cheap memory, mainly SDHC, as in the case of Panasonics own HMC151. That trend can only continue, and my prediction is that the workflow that P2 imposes - having to frequently download - will increasingly be seen as unacceptable, certainly in this sector of the market.

[Dan Brockett]

Originally Posted by Ellis Kendrick

Sony just started shipping its 32 GB cards. 64s are nowhere in sight...

What do they sell for?

Dan