Panasonic now shipping the AJ-PCS060 P2 Store
 

This is the little 60GB hard drive with a P2 slot which is small enough to be worn on your belt or mounted on the camera or tripod. We've discussed it around here before. See the press release:

Panasonic announces availability of the AJ-PCS060 P2 Store.

MSRP is $1800. I'm wondering if we'll soon see an AJ-PCS200 P2 Store, with a 200GB hard drive, or something similar? Can't be too far away.

Good for field recording and production, not yet for event videography - and some news coverage sometimes fit in the "event videography" category. Hope they can make one with a 30 second transfer or less of the the entire 4 GB P2 card.
-EDWIN

4GB card? Shoot, pretty soon the 8GB will be the entry point. The 2GB cards have been completely phased out, I'm sure the 4GB is not far behind.

It claims to transfer 4GB in 4 minutes with the "verification function" off. If you shoot 1080p it is about real time without verification. In other modes might be faster than realtime, but I expected something faster.

Does anybody know if the hard drive will be upgradeable?

So you can load say 7 8gb cards while in the field. What's that, 60-80mins at 1080p? Might be better to bring a laptop and a p2 card reader into the field.

I'm assuming there are p2 card readers...

Actually every laptop is a P2 card reader, as long as that laptop has a standard PCMCIA slot (and just about all of 'em do). All you need on top of that is the free P2 card driver software.

Chris: Do you know if it's posible to read the P2 cards on a CF or SM card reader?
/EDWIN

You know, someone asked earlier if there would be larger harddrives available or if you could swap them out...

Not that I'm overly comfortable with opening up an $1800 box and tinkering as soon as I get it, but to pull that harddrive out, ghost any software onto another harddrive and put the new one in shouldn't be too hard of an issue, should it? It couldn't be any harder than replacing a harddrive in a laptop could it?

Hi Edwin,

Sorry, not possible -- a P2 card wouldn't fit into a Compact Flash or Smart Media card reader. A P2 card is basically the same shape and pin configuration as a PC card, or perhaps better stated as a PCMCIA-compliant device. A P2 card will slide right into your basic PC card slot, and I haven't seen a laptop yet that didn't have at least one PC card slot... the same slot that accepts wireless LAN receivers, flash card adapters, FireWire adapters, modems, you name it, just about every type of computer peripheral has been adapted into a PC card. That's the nice thing about P2 cards; the fact that they can be inserted into any PC card slot. Now if your desktop PC doesn't have a PC card slot (they're far more common on laptops than desktops), then you can get the Panasonic AJ-PCD10 P2 card reader, which mounts into a standard 5.25" drive bay on your computer and accepts up to five P2 cards at once.

See my site at www.p2info.net for more info about all this stuff. Hope this helps,

iBooks doesn't have the PCMCIA card option. POWERBOOKS does.
I have to rethink my options, because with today's ibooks I could do a lot for a really low price, but then... no PCMCIA.

-EDWIN

Or, for a fraction of the price, you could simply get a PCMCIA card reader... I found one after a quick search for $85.00 that fit into a 5.25" drive and had two slots... a lot cheaper than $2500.00

I wouldn't recommend using an iBook with the HVX200. Seems like definite PowerBook territory to me.

Thanks Kevin, but ibooks don't come with 5.25". I guess Chris is right about the HVX200 belonging to the Powerbook territory and not the ibook's.
-EDWIN

Oh yeah, I was responding to Chris' thoughts about a desktop system, not an iBook. I went back and added a quote from Chris, so as not to confuse others...

iBooks would also be a little underpowered IMO. I play with the Macs all the time when I come by an Apple store. For FCPHD, I wouldn't go with anything less than either a top end Powerbook, the fastest iMac, or a Powermac G5 setup. The eMacs, iBooks, and Mac Minis just don't hold up, especially when it takes a minute or two to start the program up!