Panasonic HS2 sales

[kenfowler3966]

Having bought one of these before xmas and being very pleased with it, I was surprised to read that production has now ceased and the only ones on sale are those still in stock. As it only came out late last year this seems a very short production run?

Iwas curious to know if the following info is availbale anywhere:

1) Total units made worldwide.

2) Number sold in the uk.

I would be interested to hear any views on the economics of these machines as I would have thought a lot would have to be sold to justify the design and development costs. Or is it written off over a few models as I guess the replacement is similar inside except for the larger hard drive?

[Rasczak]

The only reason the HS2 has been withdrawn is to make way for next month's HS3 (the same as the HS2 but with a larger HDD). By all accounts the HS2 has been extremely successful (although this is hardly surprising given that, if you can afford it, it is the best DVD Recorder option available at the moment).

[Dekim]

I have heard rumours that the HS3 besides having 80gb HDD may also have Progressive Scan (see Panasonic announcements which states all new Panasonic DVD;s to have Prog Scan although it didn;t specifically mention HS3). Hopefully HS3 will also have C0-axial in addition to optical out)

Deks

[nunew33]

I would have thought development costs for this unit would be minimal.

It most probably uses PC grade componants all of which require no development costs. Panasonic already make DVD RAM PC drives. All it is is a HD, DVD ram drive, sound card, mpegcard and PCMCIA slot, all of which are commercially available, technologically mature/stable and reasonably cheap.

The most development would have been the software for the interface and making the componants work. Most of this would already exist in off the shelf software libraries and is reusable across machines. The only new thing about this box would have been the box that it is squeezed into.

There is nothing revolutionary about it that justifies a large production run to recoup r&d, unlike for example the development of plasma technology