On Oct 20, 2005, at 6:43 AM, Mark Roberts wrote:
I suspect you'll be seeing it bundled "free" with some of their
hardware in the near future.
I doubt it, unless you're talking about high-end VAR configurations
of Apple hardware. Apple does not bundle any of their "pro" apps for
free ... They haven't as yet with any existing products. I can't
imagine any reason for them to start doing that with this.
That makes sense. This just isn't a $500 product. They're probably
just
introducing it with an unrealistically high "manufacturer's suggested
retail price" to try to boost its perceived value.
Nonsense. It is a high-end photographic tool targeted to professional
production work; $500 is not out of line when you look at the retail
price of PS CS2 or Capture One Pro, its competitors. I'm sure it will
be pretty darn good ... I personally know several of the folks who
were working on it and they're pretty damn sharp both as engineers
and photographers. The only negative I see, really, is that they
haven't considered any value to developing for Pentax specific
format. That's a bit of a pain, but then they do support .DNG which
is what I've converted all my Pentax PEF files to already.
(Makes me want Pentax to just go with DNG as the native format in-
camera, really. DNG just makes more sense and is pretty similar to
what they're doing already.)
I suspect that an "Express" version will be available at some point
in the foreseeable future. And, if history is any guide, you'll find
discounting on the order of 8-15% to both products from the MSRP from
the third party distribution channel. Vendors that I've spoken with
have no trouble selling other Apple pro apps at these prices.
Users who've bought into them have been very happy too ... my brother
is a music producer/sound engineer working on anime projects. One of
his friends had been doing video production work with Avid systems
for quite a while, very profitably. When Final Cut Pro came out, he
tried it. Four months later he sold off $200,000 worth of Avid
software and hardware systems for a couple of G5-DP systems and Final
Cut Studio. His report: "$30,000 worth of hardware and software has
replaced $200,000 worth of hardware and software, and I'm getting
twice as much work done per day. I call that a big success."
The report from professionals who make a living from using equipment
and software at this level are what matters for products like this.
My needs are much much smaller at this time so I can't really judge
it yet.
Godfrey
