Since the HVX200 will be released with the 8Gb cards, what will be the future support for P2 CARDS that not yet exist? Will our current HVX200 be able to use 16 Gb, 32 Gb, 64 Gb or 128 Gb cards in the future when they come out? or will we have "upgrade" to a HVX300?

-EDWIN

Highly unlikely that there's any issue here. Why should the camera care how big the P2 card is? I'm pretty sure Panasonic is thinking ahead with this; remember this is not the first P2 camera ever... P2 has been around for awhile. Future support was considered back when P2 was first introduced and the future is now, as they say.

I was just wondering based on the war going on between different HDV formats, in which every new release is a new format, leaving the older models "forward incompatible". So, I just wanna be sure that there's no limit the camera can handle with P2 as long as there are new memory sizes available.

-EDWIN

One of the cool things about this camera is the fact that there's no other solid state camcorder right now, so we are putting our money in an absoulte leader in its category... and the future of acquisition is solid state. So this might be money well invested for years to come.

The future may come around a lot quicker than expected, too. In their original "roadmap", it showed P2 card capacity growing to 16gb in 2006, and then 32gb and then 64gb and finally 128gb by sometime around 2009. The P2 card capacity is tied to the underlying SD card capacity; as soon as someone manufactures a 32gb SD card, Panasonic could then make a 128gb P2 card.

Well, Samsung has announced a breakthrough in NAND technology, and they're saying they'll have the fundamental technology in place to produce a 32gb SD card by the second half of next year! It's possible that the 128gb P2 card could appear as much as three years sooner than anticipated. I'm sure it would be exorbitantly expensive, but it'd also provide five and a half hours of continuous 720/24p recording time...

As far as I know, the current HVX200 will be able to read all future P2 card capacities. As long as the card itself carries the "P2" logo, the camera should be able to work with it. At least up to the 128gb capacity.