The price of complex consumer video equipment keeps falling, sometimes to eye-watering prices!
We've often said that there are moments when you look at the price of a piece of electronics and wonder whether you're seeing correctly.
The simple fact is that Moore's law is still alive and healthy, and no more so in the field of consumer electronics. The constant doubling of processor power, due to ever-shrinking component sizes, ensures that you get more for less across a whole slew of products.
But that's not all. As we detailed here, software is getting better too. And we're getting cleverer at modularising it - so that once it's written, you can use it across a range of products. It means you don't have to start from scratch. Sometimes, you see imitations of well-known products on the market almost at the same time as the originals!
This phenomenon is really taking us to extremes. I saw this device on a low-cost consumer tech site in the UK. It's a 720p camera and recorder - including an 8GB storage card. It's £17.99. That's about a third of the cost of a tank of fuel in the UK. It's the price of a main course in a typical restaurant. It's two bottles of wine in a supermarket.
Think about it: a high definition video camera and a screen, storage and a recorder.
Any cheaper and it would be free.
And it's not just at this level that these changes are happening. It's across the board. It's why you can buy cameras that are without question cinema quality for under ten thousand pounds (and arguably a thousand pounds in some cases if you exclude the cost of the lens).
Makes you wonder what we're going to be buying in the discount stores in five year's time.