REDMAG SSD Cards Will Have a Dramatic Price Drop Very Soon

RED just recently announced a significant firmware update, and in what will surely be music to the ears of many, according to Jarred Land of RED, the costs for their raw stock of SSDs has gone down dramatically. Therefore they will be lowering the prices across the board for REDMAGs. Since RED uses proprietary firmware and housings with their drives (unlike say Blackmagic with their Cinema Camera), the only choice EPIC and SCARLET owners have is to use RED-branded media. But when are they coming and how much will the price drop be?

In a recent REDUser posting, Jarred detailed the new prices (which includes a new addition, the 512GB card). These cards will all hit the RED website on July 17th.

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• 64Gb -   $725 vs. $950
• 128GB - $1250 vs. $1800
• 256GB - $2450 vs.$3200
• 512GB -  $3900

Jarred also had this to say about pricing:

Market pricing can be a dangerous game to play... sometimes things don't make sense. Shortages or overages can dramatically change pricing on some chips and not others overnight. Moores law gets a bit twisted. I guess I should go back and say " Temporary" price reduction on the original post.

I'm sure many would hope that they are not just temporary, and are, in fact, permanent price reductions. RED has also been working on lower-priced 32GB cards that were announced at NAB and are specifically designed for SCARLET users -- but they aren't ready for prime-time yet. The 512GB cards mentioned above are a new class that RED is calling Turbo cards, and these red RED cards (yes they're actually red) will allow for faster offload times and lower compression at higher frame rates (which I'm sure many data wranglers/DITs would be happy to hear). As of right now the 512GB card is the only one that has been given Turbo classification, but here are the specs on those new cards vs. the standard black ones:

• Turbo REDMAG Build 3.3 5K WS vs. Original REDMAG for 5K WS
• 24 - 3:1 vs. 24 - 3:1
• 30 - 3:1 vs. 30 - 3:1
• 48 - 5:1 vs. 48 - 5:1
• 60 - 6:1 vs. 60 - 6:1
• 96 - 9:1 vs. 96 - 10:1
• 120 - 11:1 vs. 120 - 12:1

Here is a photo of a pack of the new 512GB Turbo cards:

At some point all of these cards might also be available in lower price form as part of the bundles that RED sells. If so, that might also mean that there will be even more of a discount per GB. If you're looking at the best bang for the buck, the 512GB card is actually only $7.60 per gigabyte, as compared to a little over $9 and as much as $11 for the others.

Though all of these might seem incredibly overpriced, if you look at other companies, like Sony for example, a 64GB card is $1400 vs. $725 for the equivalent REDMAG - though the Panasonic P2 cards are right around the price of the RED media (assuming you're still using a Panasonic camera that requires those).

So RED owners, will you be filling up your cart with new RED media on the 17th?

Link: New REDMAG Pricing REDUser