Here in Vegas it‘s $4 for a paper cup of coffee, $3 to use an ATM, $5 to ride the Las Vegas Monorail from casino to casino. Of course, New Yorkers are now paying $4 a gallon of gas, so why kvetch about airport prices at NAB? I suppose I‘m savoring the irony. Big iron telecines here used to fetch a half million, ENG camcorders and VTRs fifty thousand and up. Ah, the salad days.

At Sunday‘s Panasonic press conference, a newly announced AJ-HPS1500 hybrid DVCPRO/P2 recorder with five P2 slots plus Gig E, FireWire, and USB 2 connectivity seemed downright pricey at $19,950. Not so a new AJ-PCD20 P2 card reader for Mac and PC introduced at a tenth the price, $1,950.

Welcome to equipment costs in the brave new era of laptop postproduction. As my Digital Content Producer colleague Dan Ochiva implies in his trenchant blog entry “Panasonic‘s P2 set to flatten the world,” commoditized technology does level the playing field by introducing lower commodity pricing, thereby disrupting prior relationships between R&D and manufacturing costs and pricing and profit margins.

This is a trend that can only accelerate with virulence. At Panasonic‘s press conference John Baisley, president of Panasonic Broadcast, noted that in the past year P2 card prices had dropped by half while doubling in capacity. He then boasted that with P2, “media costs are non-existent.” I suppose that‘s true if you buy P2 cards by the truckload or never offload P2-captured video to tape cassette.

Anyway, Avid at its Sunday press conference announced a new software-only Avid Media Composer for Mac and PC at just $4,995. (Dongle required but not extra.) It wasn‘t so long ago that an Avid Media Composer cost 10 times that much.

Re: camcorders, the sweet spot for new broadcast HD products at NAB seems to have descended into the $20K realm. Grass Valley‘s “IT-immersed” Infinity, which debuted in a working version at Thomson‘s press event, will sell in this vicinity. (Actually 20K Euros, so add 20%.) No prosumerish camcorder this, but a full-bodied, conventionally shaped 2/3” workhorse albeit with unconventional storage options: off-the-street consumer compact flash and new REV removable hard disks from Iomega.

What else does your $20K get these days?

With Infinity it buys: 1080i 50/60, 720p 50/60, 480i and 576i. (24p, 25p to come.) Multiple codecs of DV 25 at 4:1:1 or 4:2:0, I-frame and long-GOP MPEG-2 in SD (4:2:0, 4:2:2) and HD (4:2:0), and—an industry first!—wavelet-based intraframe JPEG 2000. A few years ago you couldn‘t have such versatility at any price.

There‘s more: a PC under the hood running open-source Red Hat Linux with connectivity via USB 2, FireWire, HDMI, Gig E, and legacy I/O of SDI, HD-SDI, and composite video.

Little wonder one of Sony‘s two new XDCAM HD models (more to come on this remarkable product line) will list well under $20K.

Also little wonder companies like Sony Broadcast are hurting these days where it truly hurts, the balance sheet. Commoditization, like globalization, is a two-edged sword. Did someone say HDV?

As Digital Content Producer colleague Steve Katz reports in his blog entry “3d House of Worship,” about proceedings at this weekend‘s Digital Cinema Summit, an air of financial desperation hangs over the world of content creation and theatrical distribution too.

At press conferences of production and post exhibitors I‘ve attended so far, little, if anything, new or breakthrough has been introduced. Apple didn‘t even bother with a press conference this year, one of the highlights of NABs past.

Like deer frozen in the headlights of a speeding car, maybe some don‘t know which way to turn.

Like I said, maybe this puts deciding to invest in one of those $4 bran muffins here at NAB in perspective. Then again, maybe not.

Incidentally, the most interesting thing I learned at Panasonic‘s press conference? A Panasonic presenter, dismissing MPEG-2 as long-in-the-tooth, hailing from the dawn of DVDs, announced that by NAB 2007, Panasonic would include in P2 a new codec, H.264. It‘s to be called “AVC-intra,” signifying an all I-frame version of the MPEG-4 codec popularized by Apple. Panasonic will brand this P2 version “P2 HD.”

But perhaps the pot shouldn‘t call the kettle black. The DV codec, basis of DVCPRO and DVCPRO HD, hails from the same primordial era of the mid-90s. By contrast, H.264, twice as efficient as DV, will offer each P2 card a 100 percent increase in recording time. Not bad! But why a year from now?