We have talked about the CitiDISK in the past and I've been meaning to check out there products in more detail, so today at DV Expo I stopped by their booth and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they have a new drive, the CitiDISK HD which is designed to work with the Panasonic HVX200. The first thing I noticed about the CitiDISK HD is that it is tiny, about half the size of the FireStore drive. The drive features a simple sleek design and runs for 90 minutes on its internal battery and another 3 hours with the external battery. With the current price and capacity of P2 cards an external hard drive storage solution is a good idea. The drive will be ready to ship when the HVX200 is released at the end of the month and comes in three sizes 80GB, 100GB, 120GB with the 100GB model running $1,160.DVguru @ DV Expo, The CitiDISK HD
We have talked about the CitiDISK in the past and I've been meaning to check out there products in more detail, so today at DV Expo I stopped by their booth and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they have a new drive, the CitiDISK HD which is designed to work with the Panasonic HVX200. The first thing I noticed about the CitiDISK HD is that it is tiny, about half the size of the FireStore drive. The drive features a simple sleek design and runs for 90 minutes on its internal battery and another 3 hours with the external battery. With the current price and capacity of P2 cards an external hard drive storage solution is a good idea. The drive will be ready to ship when the HVX200 is released at the end of the month and comes in three sizes 80GB, 100GB, 120GB with the 100GB model running $1,160.Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Yea you would think these devices could be cheaper but I think a large portion of the budget goes towards R&D and production, especially for such a specialized product.
And if you compare these drives to the current price per GB of a P2 card it is significantly less though still not cheap.
3. I'm suspicious about the motives involved with these drives. I've read 2 seperate reports that state that the Firestore drive won't be available until March, and that Panasonic will be selling them directly. I've also read from someone else at the show that when he talked to the Citi people, they hadn't been given a DVX200 ahead of time to develope their drive. So, some questions:
Is Panasonic rigging things so people will be forced to buy expensive P2 cards initially?
By "officially blessing" Firestore, are they able to charge a significant markup for, as a previous poster said, a notebook drive and circuitry?
Some of this is hearsay and rumours, but something in Denmark is emitting an odour.
Posted at 5:02PM on Dec 9th 2005 by KD
4. KD doesn't have that right. First off, the correct Panasonic camera model is the AG-HVX-200. Secondly, I was at DV Expo and know some of the Pansonic and Shining people. Panasonic actually offered the Shining folks one of their AG-HVX-200 cameras to display in their booth with Shining's new CitiDISK HD model. In addition, several Panasonic people commented on how impressed they were with the CitiDISK HD. Keep in mind that one's storage capacity is limited with the P2 card, so a small external FireWire drive like the CitiDISK can come in pretty handy. And I believe Shining is offering it in 80GB, 100GB and 120GB versions -- adds just a little storage horsepower! Also, for those unsure of the value add these drives offer, remember that they do something very valuable in addition to storing video -- they allow users to take their video directly into their NLE packages and skip the video recapture process, saving lots and lots of time!
Posted at 2:42PM on Dec 22nd 2005 by GC
1. Would somebody care to explain why a semi-ruggedized 2.5" hard drive with a battery and some fancy electronics costs more than, oh say, an iBook?
At least a chunk of the cost of the P2 cards can be explained by the cost of the high speed SD memory cards it's made from!
Posted at 2:02AM on Dec 9th 2005 by Ryan McLean