So ABC Aus is in and FOX here in the US too! Great, they sure have the money for it. Now, please give me the price for a new 16 or 32gig card if I decide to switch cameras. I was surely not talking about networks and the like. I'm talking about the regular consumer/prosumer.

Solid state memory is indeed the way to go and is and will be the future, but will it be P2 cards? That is what I'm concerned with. Someone packages the memory in a different card style and introduces it in a different camera system, and then who decides what we will use, not Panasonic!

Look at the recent history of memory cards and such. Sony memory sticks and Pro memory sticks, MMC/SD cards, Compact Flash cards, Smart Media, and on and on!

Memory is memory and thank God it is getting cheaper to manufacture and buy. But, what if Sony or Canon or someone else jumps into the same market, and you know they will! What if one of the other manufacturers of memory decides to jump in on its own and has a great memory system to sell to camera manufacturers? They could dominate the market. A simple card, a universal socket, and straight forward marketing to camera manufacturers. A winner for a while, just like MiniDV was! MiniDV has lasted a good while now and will hang on a few more years, but it will go by the wayside before long. The difference that I see is that the MiniDV cassette tape and codec was adopted by a consortium of camera manufactures, thereby giving it some weight and a more solid future. Who, besides Panasonic, is building cameras using the P2 card system? There may be some I have not heard of, but none that I know of. Is it proprietary, are they licensing it to other camera makers?

Someone will come along and market to the normal consummer/prosummer/professional and still be there for the network types. When I was at NAB last year, I saw dozens of cameras and systems that are never mentioned here on this forum. And, for good reason, as we will never use them or buy them. They are for the huge networks with seemingly unlimited supplies of money.

I just think that for us, on this forum, the simple truth is that if the cards don’t get real big real soon and cost a lot less, that the P2 system will not be the one we on this forum are using to shoot our independent films, weddings and commercial presentations on a year or two from now.

Solid state memory based systems will be the future, just maybe not P2 at the cost it is now. A quick check finds the price of an 8gig P2 card at B&H at $1,129.95 each. I don’t know what Panasonic’s profit margin is on these cards, Jan?, but if I were Panasonic I would be selling them at cost or below. Otherwise I think that they will be replaced by another.

I have seen a few things come and go in my days.

This is just the humble opinion of a seasoned idiot, stirring up a little controversy. :)

Mike

I just love the spin put on P2 cards as "no moving parts". Well what happens everytime you take a P2 card out of the camera, you're moving the card. That mean a large number of electrical connections are being broken and then remade as the card is plugged into another device to dump the contents. Work out how many times this is done over an 8 hour shoot and the "no moving parts" concept flies out the window.
From my decades of experience no connection system will survive this for very long, a very large part of all computer problems are connection related. Keeping the connectors on the P2 card as clean as possible is going to help, any abrasive grit or corrosive gases will accelerate contact failure.
The design of any connection system that's going to be cycled regularly requires very strict control of the hardness of the contact plating. Get either mating contact different and very quickly the plating is worn off exposing the base metal and that's when oxidisation starts, leading to high contact resistance. Panny might be able to control the contacts in the P2 cards and the cameras but users are plugging the cards into all manner of PCMCIA slots.
Pelican make a range of small cases that house PCMCIA cards very nicely, I'd suggest anyone that's using P2 cards invest in those cases to keep their cards in. Do not put the card into pockets without a cover over the connector, getting any grit or lint inside the socket is not doing the contacts any favours.

Bob,

As Panasonics' white-papers show, the P2 connector, which is a redesigned PCMCIA Type II, has been failure-mode tested to over 30,000 insertion cycles. That comes out to approximately 10 cycles a day for more than 8 years. So it's safe to say that you'll be upgrading the card way before it physically wears out.

This connector has already proven itself in the rugged ENG environment with the first shoulder-mount P2 cam, it's even been in ultra harsh scenarios such as Antarctica, the Mohave Desert and the deep tropics. Granted, no connector could well survive having dirt or liquid heaped on it, but Panny addressed the issue of connection robustness quite well. I can attest to that myself from my in-field, dirty environment usage.

And with respect to the "no moving parts" argument, you can't compare any solid-state device to something with a spinning disk that requires heads, either electromagnetic or optical, to stay in alignment and even to a lesser degree, tape. And taken to it's logical end, your perspective of "movement" would apply to the entire camera itself, not just it's media being physically moved around.

Lets not forget that DSLR's and other digi-still cameras have been using solid state media - SD/CF/XD - for many years well before the inception of P2. I've had the first pro Canon DSLR, the 1D since it's release and I can guarantee it's had more than 10,000 insertion cycles using the same CF cards with nary an issue. In fact I've had the shutter mechanism replaced twice because I wore it out, but the CF receiver and the cards have held up.

And RED is also supplying a FLASH module as well. They need to supply a more robust means for recording in harsh environments. IMO, I wouldn't trust hard drive recording in lots of situations where we casually accept video tape.

Kevin already addressed this, but I just wanted to add to what he said. 640Mbps (80MBytes/sec) is the current maximum advertised for P2 media. But theoretically it could be as fast as 1032Mbps, which is the maximum bandwidth of the 32bit PCMCIA CardBus interface. Even the 1032Mbps (129MBytes/sec) isn't that fast by today's standards. It does surpass what individual hard drives and some small RAID configurations can do, but even as far back as 5 years ago, I had RAID systems pushing over 200MBytes/sec to run multi-stream uncompressed SD through the VideoToaster on Pentium III systems. IMO, P2's biggest shortcoming and eventual downfall will come from the PCMCIA interface... It's obsolete.

Bad example. I was standing in the bed of a pickup truck and went to hand someone a P2 card. Thought they had it, it fell and hit pavement from a height of about 6.5ft. ...Dead P2 card. It hit with enough force just being dropped that it physically damaged the corner of the card (opposite the connector end). P2 is robust in its own way because it doesn't have moving parts and extreme temperatures aren't going to bother it in the same way as they would effect hard drive mechanisms. Beyond that, it's just another sensitive electronic device that must be handled with a certain degree of care.

I would agree with that, but I can't for two reasons. One is that P2 pricing has failed to adjust with the rapidly falling prices of the technology on which it is based. Second, it's based on the PCMCIA standard -- a format that is now obsolete in the computer world. It is going to be increasingly difficult to find standard equipment in which to plug in P2 cards -- thus necessitating the use of devices like Panasonic's PCD20 P2 Drive, a P2 "deck" or reading cards via the camera. This isn't a critical issue, but it does begin to drive P2 further into the realm of proprietary interfaces and hardware as time goes on. Of course, we're all expecting products such as a PCMCIA interface that can plug into an ExpressCard slot, but they have been a long time coming and while supposedly in beta testing, are still not available for direct purchase. I'm wondering just how long such a product will stay on the market or a company will be willing to support such a thing. Outside of P2 media, there is very little reason for such a device as most PC peripherals have been updated with ExpressCard equivalents or will soon be. And the ExpressCard versions are usually superior to their PCMCIA predecessors and cost less than the PCMCIA to ExpressCard adapter will. I don't see a significant market force driving such a product.

As I've said several times now in various ways, it's a foregone conclusion that P2 memory cards will *not* become a widely used method of recording video for general purposes. It's a dead-end media format for all but a few high-end users, especially now that even Panasonic is talking about shipping an HD camera using standard flash memory cards. Add to that the transition from PCMCIA to ExpressCard technology in laptops (as mentioned by others), and P2 is in a bad position moving forward.

P2 pointed the way to a tapeless future but has been surpassed (for general purposes) by more affordable and more widely available stock memory cards. Standardization and low cost will easily win out over any technological advantages of P2.

Frankly, I'm getting tired of waiting.
 

IMO, no one has lived up to the promise of either the HVX or P2 technology. The camera's been on the market for more than a year, and the only viable alternative for long-form recording, (short of taking out a second mortgage for a bunch of 8GB cards - and then learning how to juggle), is the FireStore, which was still generating complaints from some buyers up to the latest firmware release. I'm tired of being so restricted.

I find projects are falling behind because no one has filled the void with anything large and reliable- not Panasonic, not Focus Enhancements, and certainly not Shining. SpecComm seems to be the best shot at getting something large and reliable any time soon.

I admit I'm only a tiny, one-man show, and my budget is limited. That's what forces me to wait until something has proven widely reliable. But why is it taking so long? I bought my HVX nearly a year ago. At that time, the web sites involved read like it was already available, even though I couldn't find anyone who had it. Then, when it was, there were stories of problems. Based on posts around forums like this one, even today it seems like there's a 50/50 chance someone would have problems with it. The idea of upgrading any kind of electronic device through firmware is nice, even clever; but the practice seems to require improvement.

What is this "Group Buy List" I've seen mentioned for the Cineporter? And, how does one get on it? Right now, it's got to be that, or wait for the latest FS-100 firmware release to be proven through comments in the forums.

This wasn't meant to be a rant, but my patience is wearing thin after nearly a year for me, and somewhat longer than that for Panasonic to get these things right. I feel like I'm driving an SUV that's limited to a gas tank no larger than the one on my lawn mower: lots of promise for freedom, but almost uselessly-short on utility until the manufacturer perfects a larger tank and I can afford to pay the dealer to obtain - and install - one.

I think it's arguable that some folks just aren't getting the message: it seems clear to me that HVX users want something that will reliably record for greater lengths of time...whether it "spins" or it's solid state. I think they'll live with the former while waiting for the latter, but please, somebody, get us one that is reliable and larger. I'd be happy even if it were only for DV thru DVCPRO50.

Before I continue, let me just say I really, really love the debate. I have never been a part of any other forum that is so absolutely filled to the gills with so many technical and creatively knowledgeable people - ever. This forum rocks.

Now, to Jeff's points:

- Nobody is saying P2 is impervious to damage of any kind, just that it is far more robust than anything else, save another solid-state media. I've had CF cards that were dropped or hit and went bad - nothing is indestructible.

- PCMCIA is obsolete only in the laptop computing world, not the video realm, it's brand new. And as far as compatibility options, do you think XDCAM has more compatibility than P2? You have even less options with that. Will P2 last as long as tape has? Doubtful since the evolution of tech is much faster than 20 years ago, but who knows exactly what the future holds. I certainly don't think P2 is any less viable than Olympus' decision to create XD-type RAM.

To a certain degree P2 can still be considered in it's infancy; it's a brand new media for video acquisition and as such is still finding it's "sea legs" if you will. Is it as widely accepted or as easily compatible as tape today? No, but as Jan has pointed out in short order you'll find the P2 footprint becoming much larger and with greater acceptance in all genres of production.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent literally hundreds of hours researching the differing media types not only for today but for planned future expansion. P2 simply offers the most options - now and later - than any other system.

For example: Can you put an HDV tape into an F900? Or put an XDCAM disk into a Z1? Or how about putting a Varicam tape into an HVX? No, none of that. But you can put the same P2 card in an HVX, shoot whatever codec/frame rate/format you want AND take that same P2 card and put it into any ENG P2 body you want and keep shooting. No other system offers that type of crossover usage or flexibility. Period.

Is P2 perfect? Is it for everyone? Will it compete with RED? No. Not yet. (^_*)

Maybe not in those exact words, but close! Send me a few to drop and stomp on and we will see how many will survive. Better yet, I'll leave them where my cute little dog can get her teeth on it. You should see what she can do with thumb drives! Always keep back-ups!

So I understand that if I buy my new F900 from B&H for $80,000 (without lens or anything else) I can't stick my MiniDV tapes in it! Damn, that does suck! How many P2 card slots does it have?

Are we really talking apples and oranges here? Be forwarned that I know far more about fruit than I do cameras.

:)

Can't argue with that... Probably the biggest reason I keep coming back here.

Sure... I was just saying that your example of dropping the various media from shoulder height wasn't real good (sorry). Anything can be damaged from being dropped and as you say, nothing is indestructable. You won't get any arguments from me about P2 media being more robust than hard drive storage... In many ways it is. I do a lot of shooting in cold weather and in situations where there's lots of vibrations or potential impact to camera/operator. I refuse to trust/use hard drive recording in these situations. -15F temps are not hard drive friendly, but so far P2 hasn't given me one single problem with the cold. I screwed up a Canon XL1S at -24F - the tape mechanism froze up. My HVX with P2 has handled that sort of cold on multiple occasions.

I did say it was obsolete the in the computer world. ;) But yes, it's now up to Panasonic to continue to push the P2 standard and PCMCIA interface. Computer manufacturers have already written it off and this does create an uphill battle for P2 in some ways. Two years ago, any notebook computer you bought could mate up with a P2 card. Today it requires a crappy second-hand notebook or some junk model that's on the clearance table. Tomorrow we'll have to use oddball adapters or more video-industry proprietary hardware. I wish that weren't the case, but it is. As for XD media, they have a chance to go the other way... XD discs are essentially MPEG2 BluRay media. We'll have to see where that takes it, but being in that plastic shell or caddy restricts it from dropping into conventional BD players. Current XD decks / players are very expensive, so I think XD has it's own set of issues. I also don't feel that XD Professional Discs are any more robust than hard drive media. It's a rotating disc platter, only optical tech rather than magnetic, and is still vulnerable to shock and vibration as well as extreme temperatures.

Hmmm... As far as media itself goes, perhaps. Too bad the price is out of wack right now in relation to capacity. Camera products that use P2 media are still a whole different discussion entirely. My HVX200 still continues to impress me in many ways, but also disappoints in many ways too. How P2 evolves over the next several months will influence my decision on whether or not I keep the HVX200. If I can upgrade to 32GB or larger P2 media this year for a reasonable and competitive price, then great. If not, I will probably dump the HVX200 altogether. Current 8GB cards are overpriced and inconvenient for a lot of what I do these days. 16GB cards would be nice, but aren't going to solve all the issues and I will probably pass on them in favor of 32GB or 64GB P2 media.

I am planning to acquire RED, but that is still a moving target and even once it's here, I will still have need for a camera like the HVX200 or something more oriented to ENG purposes that can also fill a secondary role to the RED One. The HVX200 with a 35mm adapter and a nice set of Nikkor lenses is a powerful tool. I would prefer not parting with it just yet and some of the other offerings coming up like the HPX500 are more broadcast oriented and not quite what I'm looking for. I'd love an updated HVX200 with a higher-res sensor block, an interchangeable lens mount and AVCHD or IntraHD recording to P2. 2 P2 slots are still fine if they can get the capacities up.

No, I'm not expecting P2 to ever be perfect or saying that it should be. It's not for everyone... As for RED, it's probably not even proper to use it for comparison... Although it keeps coming up and that's partially my fault too. RED still has yet to prove itself, although I have full confidence in them due to who's backing it and who's developing it... If RED were associated with just about anyone else, I would probably have an entirely different outlook. But it's a different camera with different purposes and targeted at a different market. It's a cinema camera, designed to compete with the likes of the Genesis or the Arri D20. The body itself is a lot cheaper than its competitors, but in the scheme of things, that's not going to make or break a studio or an individual production. I don't have to wait for RED, I can rent a Genesis or a D20 right now and get incredible digital cinema results... Rentals of those units are still cheaper than purchasing RED... RED affords me the opportunity to OWN the camera outright... Beyond that, it still remains a new product that must prove itself and will undoubtedly have its share of growing pains. As for how RED fits in with P2 tech, it's hard to say... They have a FLASH module, but formats are still in development and we don't know if it will use proprietary media or even off the shelf media. It may even make some small bit of sense for RED to jump on the P2 bandwagon if 64GB cards can enter production this year for a reasonable price.

B&H sells the F900? Hehe... That would be funny if they did.

Doesn't the high-end Firestore drive work with the HVX200 and most HDV cameras plus any DV camera, with the potential to be adapted to future formats? That sounds like a much more flexible solution to me, with longer recording times and significantly lower cost per hour of recording. Meanwhile, you've got everything from Grass Valley Infinity to consumer-priced AVCHD cameras starting to use standard flash memory cards for video recording, which shows where we're heading as flash prices continue to plummet while capacity increases. There's no way P2 can hope to compete against either of these options for anything but niche purposes. If Panasonic ships their AVC-intra camera using non-P2 memory, that should about be the end of P2 as a forward-looking format.

P.S. Can you put a P2 card in an HDV camera or a Varicam or an XDCAM HD or Grass Valley Infinity or "Red"? Hardly a crossover media type.

The Firestore is a third-party device and again can't be compared to solid-state media. And both the crossover and adaptablility comparison is made within the same-brand config. There is no other media native-to-the-brand system that works with both the handheld and ENG-type bodies.

Mike - the F900 doesn't shoot HDV, it's shoots HDCAM, DVCAM or DV (?). The HVX shoots every codec/format it's bigger P2 brothers do, no other system can match that. The F330/350 shoots HDV, but at a different bitrate than the Z1/FX1 and it's a totally different media - discs, not tape. No crossover.

HDV (DV) tape works with everything from the Sony HC1 to JVC HD250U to Canon XL-H1, and is backwards compatible with every DV camera including ENG models (assuming they can take the small tapes). Firestore is even more flexible and works across brands because it's not a proprietary product like P2. Standard flash memory will replace P2 for most suitable purposes because it offers the same basic functionality at lower cost and without the proprietary limitations. P2 is a non-starter for anyone who hasn't already invested in it, end of story.

...and you're still talking about tape and spinning disc media, not solid-state tapeless. End of that story. (laughs)