Not to mention that there is a standard in place with several standards committee partners. To deviate from that could pose any number of problems. And at DV 50 rates/higher bitrates/faster tape/less compression etc....you might as well be using HDCam for 5 times the price. Sony has other cams they gotta sell too. :-)

SPOT,
I'll have to disagree with you for once. Sorry but this conspiracy theory thing really bugs me. I hear it coming from so many quarters and by people who should know better.
Any design engineer is constrained by many factors, doesn't matter if they're designing cars, microwave ovens or cameras. Think of the bounds they have to work within as being an envelope but made of tough elastic. You push a bump in one direction, in this case higher bitrate and you find either you have to enlarge all the envelope and push up cost, weight etc and / or as you said go outside an existing standard. Now OK the suggestion here was leave the tape format as it was but throw in an optional higher bitrate down the 1394 port. So apart from anything else what's going to capture the data, what are it's storage requirements and what's going to be able to view / edit it?
Can you see how well received the engineer would be whose trying to trying to push that idea? Yeah lets add $100 to the cost of the thing for a feature 99% of the users will never understand much less use.
If you want to go outside the envelope yourself, you can buy a HiDef head, add your own lens and encoders / recording device. Most of the camera manufacturers have these on offer and it's quite a sensible approach, you need to think in terms of how the scaling of quality works. There's no point offering higher bitrate encoding and all its attendant costs if you suddenly hit the limits of the glass etc.
Now OK, the next step up from HDV is a BIG one and that makes perfect sense to me. Anyone engaged in serious production has many cost factors, the cost of the camera is only a small part but its a mission critical piece of gear, if it fails it can cost $100Ks in lost production, same even goes for audio gear, I'd suggest $1000 shotguns don't sound that much better than $100 ones, the big difference is the build quality. Same goes for cameras.
Even taking HDV out of the argument, pro cameras probably don't take images THAT much better than anyone can shoot with a PD170, but they are built to last and while they're spending all those extra dollars to make the thing bullet proof (literally in some cases) then they can justify the costs of all the bits that improve the image quality.
Sony / Panasonic etc know this, they do talk to their customers, they do listen to those who use their products day in, day out to make a living.
Go into the average consumer camera shop or car sales showroom, what are the things that sell the cars and cameras? Double over head cams / bitrate? No, coffee cup holders and a zillion useless features! How do you think the average mum who wants to take some 'video' of her kids is going to take to the idea of interchangeable lenses? How is she going to fit the extra lens in her handbag would be the first thing she'd think of! This's why there's still sales of Hi8 / VHS cameras, anything beyond that confuses Joe Average, I'd suggest 95% of all the video shot is never edited, so long as they can somehow recognise Johhny scoring the goal they're happy.
Now I'll admit Sony over the last few years probably miscalculated the demand for better prosummer cameras, the DVX 100 was a wakup call for them and they've responded very admirably but it's still a piece of engineering, built to a pricepoint, a standard and a user ease of use. I'll still bet most of the HDV footage being shot on these cameras will never go into "post", the average user will buy the camera for it's geek value and play the tapes, as recorded, back out of the camera.
Bob.

"Yeah lets add $100 to the cost of the thing for a feature 99% of the users will never understand much less use."

$100 added to the manufacturing cost means the retail price of the camera just went up by $500. This may sound odd, but that's the math every large company has to use. You can learn it in MBA school, or you can find it out for yourself running a larger company.

Actually $100 could be a reasonable cost estimate for bumping the data and video processing rate from 25 to 50 Mb/s, it's not trivial at all.

"I'd suggest $1000 shotguns don't sound that much better than $100 ones, the big difference is the build quality. Same goes for cameras.
Even taking HDV out of the argument, pro cameras probably don't take images THAT much better than anyone can shoot with a PD170"

I'm using a $1500 shotgun and its sound cannot be even remotely compared to a $100 ditto or even a $500 ditto. On top of that, it has unique side rejection characteristics that are not available at any lower price point. This makes it possible for me to shoot when others have to take the day off, and for regular shoots I don't have to worry about the sound character suddenly changing because the microphone angle changed slightly relative to the subject (as is the case with nearly all other shotguns).

In a serious pro camera EVERYTHING is better. Far better CCDs, far better signal processing, far better lenses available, more robust tape formats, low compression for better picture (personally I love no compression), better low light sensitivity, better chromakey, far better highlight rendering (in those that have pre-knee circuits between the CCDs and the A/D converters especially), better audio, far better viewfinders, far better DOF control (thanks to 2/3" chips), etc., etc., and of course, oh-by-the-way, it is more robust also (especially Sony gear).

It doesn't have a cup holder though, although sometimes that seems like a really good idea. There is certainly room...

Sony created DVD camcorders to suit those people who truly don't want tto edit their home movies, could be a good idea for them.

I don't think that it will be that bad of a rate (in terms of people who edit their videos). Most people who buy the FX1 in the long long run may do something like that for people who have their HD Tv's and want to show off their High Def camcorder (though even that seems less likely). However, more and more people who would buy a 3-5K camcorder for it's geek value would be geeky enough to either buy or warez an editor for their computer and edit it.

Just my opinion.

BTW, what was it that you guys were talking about earlier with the different footage and the sideways movement on the Z1. I wasn't able to follow what you guys were talking about but it sounded like cramming HD into DV25 should cause some problems with encoding and so on. I don't know if this will make enough sense to be able to answer. Also, what's the difference between mini DV and DVCAM, if they're both DV25 what does it matter?

Thanks for any help

Sorry but this conspiracy theory thing really bugs me.
I don't know that there is a conspiracy, it's that 4 companies got together and set a standard so that things would work together. I'd not call that a conspiracy. Had all 4 companies said "We're gonna push 50 Mbps down the pipe," it still would be a standard. Sony needs to abide by the standard set by the group that they're members of, that's all. Sony doesn't own the name HDV, it's jointly owned by all 4 companies, and I'm sure that eventually, the name/technology/format will be licensed to others, such as Panasonic. Or maybe they'll do their own thing.
But as Course points out, (and I'd somewhat dispute his numbers, as I know in small manufacturing a nickel part adds nearly a dollar to the retail price) adding things at the manufacturing end exponentially increase cost. So, if the cam ended up costing say....15K, is there enough incentive there for people to jump on HDV right now when for double the price, they can get into a much higher end HDCam system? I dunno. I'm not in that particular level of the game, but I'd wager not. I think we'll start seeing higher end HDV cams, but not til the format is firmly established. I don't think we'll start seeing the price of HDCams dropping at the same rate as we'll see the cost and value of HDV cams rise in the next few years. But what do I know? :-)

"BTW, what was it that you guys were talking about earlier with the different footage and the sideways movement on the Z1. I wasn't able to follow what you guys were talking about but it sounded like cramming HD into DV25 should cause some problems with encoding and so on."

MPEG gets more compression by focusing on the differences between consecutive frames. If there is a lot of change, things can get tight.

"Also, what's the difference between mini DV and DVCAM, if they're both DV25 what does it matter?"

Nobody talked about DVCAM here, but it is the same data. The tape moves 50% faster (because of 50% wider helical tracks), so each bit covers a larger piece of tape (more magnetic particles), which makes for fewer dropouts.

SPOT,
you're misreading what I'm saying, it's the "they don't want to put that on consummer cameras because it'll hurt their pro sales" theory that I'm objecting to.
I've yet to see anything on a pro camera that could be put on a consummer camera without a big hike in price and I've seen a few things on pro cameras that I seriously doubt you'd ever want to put on consummer cameras.
Bob.

Gotcha. I put the lil' smiley there, thinking no one would take that last comment seriously. That's why I didn't respond to that in my last post, I didn't think you had taken me seriously there. I can see now you did. You're absolutely right, the pro cam and the consumer/prosumer cam are separated by a chasm much larger than just the encoding/compression formats.

"...in small manufacturing a nickel part adds nearly a dollar to the retail price..."

That could certainly be correct for an unburdened parts cost.

I always preferred to use burdened cost (direct part cost + an allocation of indirect manufacturing costs). For this you really need to have a cost accountant, but it works better for making decisions IMHO.

I found 5x burdened cost to work well as an estimate over many years of local electronics manufacturing.

In the end, it's almost comical how important gross margin (net revenue - cost of sales) is in determining if you are going to make money or not. Actual net "profit" is something ephemeral that you won't know until it's too late, but with appropriate gross margins you should be profitable, without even understanding how it happened...

How to recognize a good accountant?

Very simple, you only have to ask one question:

"How much is 2+2?"

Anybody who answers "3" or "5" is out. Obviously you can't hire them.

Anybody who answers "4", forget it. This is not the right answer here!

If they respond "How much would you like it to be?", you know that they understand the science of accounting and that there are actually a lot of choices that can be made, rather than absolute answers for everything.

This reminds me of an editing job I did recently for a doco. The tripod head had croaked in the middle of a pan, so in that place there was a sudden jump. There was no B-roll footage, and I just felt too lazy to create "fake" B-roll footage from an unrelated take at the same event.

What to do? I placed a brief, sudden lens flare in the opposite corner of where the jump was most noticeable. I played the scene all over in Vegas and the jump had disappeared. I couldn't believe my eyes. I knew where the problem was and I still couldn't see it without major concentration :O).

There are lots of choices in editing too! :O)

It may have been 20 or 30 years ago, but I remember a few choice comments by a Champion Spark Plug manufacturers rep. They were trying to introduce a "Lifetime" spark plug, the life of the car plus some.

The problem: Standard plugs cost $0.29, and the new plug would cost $0.99 in massive quantities to car manufacturers.

The final killer was, he said no one was buying because that difference, when figured into the GROSS profit calculations, added over $100.00 to the price of a V-8 automobile.

A heck of a way to do business.

I haven't heard about this particular case, but it is extremely likely that there is an important difference:

Manufacturers often avoid spending additional small amounts on better parts that would increase the quality. This is however not because their normal gross MARGIN calculations would make the retail price that much higher.

If they can't get the customer to pay the extra $0.70 because they get the lifetime plugs (forgetting about burden for this example), they just subtracted $0.70 per car from their profits. Say they sell 1 million cars per year, now they kissed off $700,000 per year that could have been used to fly in fresh salmon from France every day for the company executive lunch room (like Chrysler did before Iacocca).

In school I learned that the difference between a for-profit corporation and a non-profit such as for example a credit union is that when the for-profit actually makes a profit it may distribute it to shareholders, but the non-profit credit union finally buys the marble staircase the managers always wanted... :O)

In reality, profits are hard to predict (and hard to create), but if you're not paying serious attention to gross margins, you are likely to get your ass kicked. Non-intuitive certainly, but it's a simple fact.

I think the issue is just a little more complex than burdened costs. Take the spark plug example, the issue is, how much would it increase the marketing potential. If it'd double sales the accounts could make it cost $0.70 but that's rarely the case.

I was in the camers section of a shop earlier this year. They had the discontinued model from the Sony PC100 sized range on special, about $1000 off. I said to the prospective customer it was a bargain, not only that it had better optics and a general better build than the new model. The salesman seemed prepared to know it down even a bit more but no, this guy wanted the new model. And why did he want to pay more money for a clearly inferior camera, because it had blufang!
So what's the point here, well I think that Sony could have built a Z1 with just about every missing feature that's been asked for and it wouldn't have added that much to the build cost. That isn't the point, the point is how many more would they sell because of them and the reality is very few. So when you amortise the extra engineering and production costs over that small number of additional sales that's when you find the burdened cost is very high.
And let's not forget many of these features are for many users a negative, sure interchangable broadcast lenses are very nice in the right hands, remember no autofocus. Zebras and guidframes are great too yet I've had customers complain that the cameras is broken, I mean what's all those stripes doing in my pictures!
Having played around with the HDV camera a bit more I think one thing it really needs is a big 'dummy' button, the Z1 is going to offer far more options for getting yourself into strife too.
Bob.
Bob.

"And why did he want to pay more money for a clearly inferior camera, because it had blufang!"

Does this have anything to do with Smurf s-x?
(you know, when you have s-x till you're blue in the face)

Oh, now I am guessing it wasn't cockney after all. Bob must be referring to Bluetooth, perhaps allowing for his video camera to be remote controlled by his cell phone, or perhaps when the tape is about to run out, it dials a preprogrammed phone number to call for a new tape?

So many possibilities... :O)

I was wondering - if for every FX1 Sony sold they did a survey of the customer and asked "How will you send an HD video to your folks for this Christmas?" How many would know they can't except via a HD tape deck or by mailing the camera with the video? How many know they will be able to send a DVD one day but later?

A bunch of people HERE don't fully understand the distribution pathway of HDV or the difference between 1920x1080 and 1440x1080, or how to get SDV from the camera via downsamplle HDV as an alternative to SDV mode - so you know Joe Blow will not. How many Joe Blow's will buy this camera just because it is expensive, has been written up with praise or because it has a big HDV logo on the side? After Christmas are we to expect lots of silly questions from Joe?

I suspect few people will spend ~$3500 without understanding the basics of it.

Most likely they will buy the camera to record HD for themselves, knowing they can downconvert for the folks without HD at home...

That thing about spark plugs reminds me of the old story about the carburetor that got 100 miles to the gallon but was killed by the oil companies. Trust me, if it were possible to make a plug that NEVER needed replacing, someone would be making it. Actually, the auto companies are now touting tuneups only every 100,000 miles, which is close enough to "lifetime" as most people will ever need.

From my own experience, an incremental production cost of x forces an increase of perhaps 3x in the suggested retail price. If the improvement makes for positive ad copy, then the retail might be boosted many times that amount, simply because the marketing people think the public will perceive that much of an increase in value. The company I worked for back in '97 made filters for inkjet cartridges (for printers). Manufacturing cost was a tenth of a cent ($0.001) but the selling price was 25 cents ($0.25). Why? Because manufacturing cost had nothing to do with the selling price; the part replaced a conventional 25-cent steel filter that was difficult to work with a did an inferior job.

They will make a Windows Media HD file. Then deliver on CD or DVD and expect it to be viewed on a computer.

"They will make a Windows Media HD file. Then deliver on CD or DVD and expect it to be viewed on a computer."

As long as grandpa has at least a 2.5 GHz P4 and a good video card...