I was excited when I heard that my school was going tapeless but then, I found out that what they were moving to were P2 cards which are proprietary memory cards but are all based on flash memory. Then, I found out how much they cost, which is between $1,000 and $4,000
depending on capacity. Although I could be wrong, seeing that I have never seen what is on the inside of the card, I can only imagine it not being much different from a normal SD card on the inside. SD cards, because they are made by many companies and are used in manyb products, you card get a huge 32 GB SD card that can hold about 4 hours of high definition video for around $100. The one thing that P2 may have that I am unsure of is reliability although SD card have a decent life span. Given the choice, I would rather get 40 SD cards instead of 1 P2 card for the same price. I have only one SD card break on me in the course of many years of using them.

P2, because it is a proprietary system only certain devices use P2 cards and they are very expensive because one company, Panasonic, has a monopoly on the cards and the devices. While, SD cards have become the standard for multimedia and many devices use them. Not only that, but, many computers, have built-in SD card readers while with P2, you need to buy a special adapter. P2 is definitly an improvement over tape but, I think SD cards are going to be much more common and are also compadibility with many more devices. The era of proprietary formats is on the way out, open formats such as SD cards and USB devices are going to be more successful because they are more universal.