« Free Color Strip Effects Plugins for FCP
Introduction to Slating and Script Management Part 2 »

8GB SD Card, $190. 8GB P2 Card? Pricele$$ apparently.

2 Comments Published by Matthew Jeppsen March 19th, 2007 in Formats, Hardware, Shopping, Storage

Just-announced Sandisk 8GB SD Card = $190.00
Panasonic 8GB P2 card = $1,200.00

If you hadn’t heard, P2 storage uses SD cards internally. Now I don’t EVER expect P2 technology to be equal to consumer storage prices, obviously Panasonic is using the cream of the SD card crop in manufacturing it’s cards (or they should be). After all, who wants their solid-state storage crapping out in the middle of a critical take? Professionals are willing to pay a premium for quality and reliability. How much of a premium is the question I ask. It does seem odd that P2 pricing hasn’t shown much of a downward trend, even as major advances in both capacity and pricing have been made in the consumer arena. I wonder if we will we ever see generic-brand P2 options?

(Via Camcorderinfo Blog)

2 Responses to “8GB SD Card, $190. 8GB P2 Card? Pricele$$ apparently.”  

Feed for this Entry
  1. 1 Mike Curtis Mar 19th, 2007 at 6:31 am

    it is 4 high speed cards set up in a little RAID in there, so that pushes up the price as well.

    Always interesting when manufacturers base their proprietary gear on standard tech – as the standard tech prices fall, the proprietary tech doesn’t tend to track with it, or lags massively behind it. Considering that Panasonic has to cover R&D, marketing, manufacturing, etc. on top of the plain SD cards that are just one component, you’d think they could at least pass on the price drop after a few months lag. Not proportionate price drop, just gear price drop. We have seen a drop in the 8GB cards since they came out, but not in line with what the market is doing.

  2. 2 Shane Ross Mar 19th, 2007 at 4:21 pm

    I’m with Mike on this…there is more going on in the P2 cards than just 4 SD cards Raided inside a PCMCIA case…and they do need to pay for R&D and all that. Macs are more expensive than PCs…why is that? R&D….solid machines…great OS.

    But I also agree that the prices should fluctuate more with the market.

    I expect the price of the 8GB cards to drop when the 16Gb cards come out. And I hope they aren’t gonna be $3000 apiece.