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The machine pictured here is a Sony XDCAM EX, a 1080p tapeless HD camcorder.  It is a so-called “prosumer” model that lists for $7800.  I bought a pair of these cameras (new in the box) at the beginning of July to use for shooting this summer’s Startup Tour.  Many video professionals think these are the best HD camcorders you can buy for under $20,000.  The video is stunning — clearly network-quality or, indeed, feature film-quality.

If only they both worked.

The cameras came from  Abel Cinetech in New York City and we paid about $14,000 for the pair. The cameras worked fine for a few weeks until one froze-up in Boulder, CO.  We couldn’t get the camera to boot.  We sent it in for repair and Sony checked it into their system on 8/4. I spoke to one of their reps a few days later and was told they were waiting for parts but the camera would probably be repaired by the end of the next week.

I called that Friday and was told the parts were in and the camera was being repaired — and that I should call again in a few days. So I called back Tuesday, then Wednesday when we were in Portland and was told essentially the same thing again — they were working on it and it would be a few more days.

I called again this past Monday and was told that they needed more parts from Israel which they were expecting sometime around September 16th. The guy I spoke to was very direct and said that considering the last time they ordered parts they came in a few days late, as well as factoring in repair time — I was looking at it being ready a few days after the 16th.

At this point I started asking for a replacement, explaining that this was a new camera and that we had already spent so much on rentals (this camera rents for $100 per day).  My priority was getting it back ASAP, which  could be achieved by having it replaced. The guy suggested I speak to a manager and it might be possible to get a replacement.

I spoke to a manager named Sylvia on Tuesday of last week who said that they don’t have loaner cameras in the service department, but that it might be able to arrange something with another department. Silvia said she’d talk to the engineers and get back with me later that day. I haven’t heard from her since… In fact, I asked for her direct number at the end of the call and she declined, saying that she was going to send me an email with all of her contact info…. That never arrived either.

I suspect Sylvia isn’t a manager at all, but rather some support rep they put on the phone to appease me.

So I contacted my salesman at Abel as well as the sales manager. They both have been working with Sony, but all I have so far from them is a promise made to them by Sony that the shipping of the part to the service facility would be ‘expedited.’ They are still working on the situation, however and I’m told they will get back to me.

Although this is a warranty repair and thus free, I asked if I could perhaps, for a fee, have the repair expedited. All they could offer was that warranty repairs were given priority anyway, and that if I included a note with the camera requesting expedited repair perhaps they would do so if they had time. I included such a letter detailing how important the camera was to the production and requesting expedited repair.

At no point did Sony contact me about the status of the repair, even when it was delayed. Also, at no point did anyone at Sony offer an apology, even when I expressed to several people just how displeased I was.

These are great cameras when they work, but when they don’t work they are simply $7,800 bricks.  Sony clearly doesn’t care about its prosumer customers.  Interestingly you can get customer support on the weekend for Sony’s cheapest consumer camcorder but not for this baby.

Tell a friend.  Tell them that Sony makes fine prosumer camcorders but doesn’t support them worth a damn.  Tell them that Sylvia is a liar.  Tell them to expect to pay $3000 to rent a $7000 replacement camera if they need a repair.

And tell them to do what I probably should have done in the first place, which was stick with Panasonic. 

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There was a minor flap in tech news last week when the CEO of Activision, a huge video game company, called on Sony to drop the price of its PlayStation 3 game console, suggesting that if Sony didn’t follow this advice Activision would consider withdrawing support for the game platform altogether.  I hardly expect Activision to withdraw its PS3 support, nor do I expect Sony to dramatically reduce the price of systems that have already effectively dropped 20 percent or more in Sony’s top market, the U.S., because of the weak dollar. To the astonishment of hard-core gamers, in fact, I’d suggest that this little drama has nothing to do with game sales or games at all, but is instead directed at the Blu-Ray optical disk drive inside every PS3.  The dude from Activision, sensing blood in the water, is trying to look like a shark, for there is growing sentiment in the industry that Blu-Ray, as it was originally intended, is a failure.

How can that be?  Wasn’t it just a year ago that Blu-Ray, with its greater data capacity, triumphed over the opposing HD-DVD standard?  Well promises were made to achieve that victory and now it appears promises may have been broken.

Understand that the success or failure of Blu-Ray has little to do with games and everything to do with movies.  Two historical events informed the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.  First was the epic and costly 1980‘s competition between the BetaMax and VHS tape cassette standards.  Second was the triumphant succession of DVD over VHS, when we all replaced our tape libraries with disks, gladly paying anew for what we already owned, buying every Hollywood exec a new Mercedes in the process.

Re-fighting the battle between BetaMax and VHS was something the industry wanted to avoid when it came to an emerging HD video standard,  There had been for a moment such a potential conflict for DVD but the opposing forces were brought to a compromise by the movie studios, themselves, and a single technical standard emerged, pumping billions into the movie business as a result.  That’s the same goal that all sides had in the HD video fight — to get it over with quickly and get us all replacing our video libraries with HD.

According to Hollywood insiders who speak with me, the HD video battle was again decided by the studios when Disney and 20th Century Fox went with Blu-Ray in 2008.  The leader in that decision was reportedly Disney, which had 35 animated classic films it envisioned bringing to market in a data rich format with lots of extra material — so much material and games that HD-DVD, with its lower capacity, couldn’t hold it all on a single disk.  So it was Blu-Ray’s greater capacity that swayed Disney, along with Sony’s promise that the rampant success of PS3 game machines would quickly put Blu-Ray drives in most American living rooms.

The Disney fantasy was that Blu-Ray would triumph, PS3s would be everywhere, and American families would, all over again, buy enhanced copies of the 35 animated classics, sending up to $7 billion to Disney.

Well so far it hasn’t happened.

Yes, there are millions of PS3s in use, but millions more xBox360s and Nintendo Wii’s.  PlayStation 3 is the third-best-selling next-gen game console — third out of three, which is the wrong place to be for any competing tech standard that hopes to dominate.  Game consoles that have already been on the market for a year or more don’t suddenly win from behind like Seabiscuit.  Sony sells more PS2s still than PS3s.  PS3 was a year late to market, had supply problems, fewer game titles, and those titles usually cost a bit more than on other platforms.  But what really killed it for the movie studios was something completely different and unanticipated — the need for an HDTV to go with each PS3 Blu-Ray player.

Both the VCR and DVD revolutions required that just a single revolutionary (in the case of DVD, evolutionary) product be successful.  Your TV remained the same.  You can play a DVD on a DuMont black & white TV set from 1956, but Blu-Ray — unless you are not taking advantage of any of its, well, advantages — requires a whole new TV.  The chances of people buying simultaneously an HDTV AND a PS3 were lower and so was the dual penetration with the result that Blu-Ray disk sales, while not terrible, are also not material, yet, to the movie industry.  And the question now is whether they ever will be material?

Blu-Ray will survive, but will it be just for cinephiles?  That depends on how the 1080p download market evolves (which is why Apple has yet to sell a computer with a Blu-Ray disk installed, seeing it as eventual channel conflict with iTunes) or whether a new HD-DVD standard will emerge to compete again with Blu-Ray.

And don’t forget the impact of up-converting progressive-scan DVD players, which even Sony sells: I just bought one for $44.77 at Wal-Mart and driving the 720p display in my RV makes a standard-definition DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory look amazingly good.  Not good enough for a cinephile, but that’s five percent of the video market, tops.

Yes, Blu-Ray is better, but for many people the incentives aren’t there, which leaves us still looking for a higher-density data standard that ideally costs less than Blu-Ray. That particular need, especially in the PC industry, never went away.

This alternate standard is coming, I’m sure, and don’t be surprised if it turns out to be pretty much the same HD-DVD that lost-out a year ago, though this time probably not under the Toshiba brand.  It would make a superior archival platform and might even be used for HD video, too.  Retooling a factory to stamp HD-DVDs costs millions less than upgrading to Blu-Ray and the eventual disks are significantly cheaper.

But that The Making of Bambi featurette may have to go.