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Broadcast equipment is not very affordable in the home environment. I never did work with the 790ws. Our station was sold and the new company decided to go with DVCPro. As I recall, Panasonic was giving CBS stations a sweet deal on DVCPro equipment at the time. At one time we had 4 formats in the station- SP, SX, DigiBeta, DVCPro. The 8 edit rooms each had THREE formats- SP, SX and DVCPro. Everything was edited to SP which was the playback format in master control. DigiBeta was a commercial production format for us.
I remember hearing a CE talking about going to a consumer format as the cost of maintenance would be lower. If a camera got trashed they would just buy a new one.
So I knew my job was on the line as an ENG maintenance engineer. I knew what parts prices were and they were not cheap. Every month I had to send a lens out for repair at $1000 a pop. Those 18 crews we had out there were not cheap to maintain. We were still broadcasting in NTSC at the time. I heard from my CE that his budget was $3K a month. Also I heard that the GM's wince when they see the CE approach their office. There ain't nothing cheap in this business!
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