As the topic has stated, the price has now dropped to $5599 :) Enjoy ladies & gents.

Is this price drop due to a lack of sales? Certainly if the demand for this camera was high the price would not have dropped this quick?

I have been one of those people quietly standing on the sidelines trying to decide if I should go the route of the Z7 and maintain the SD and tape option or go to the EX and gain the benefits of that camera, albeit with a considerable investment in media.

I have really been waiting to see footage from the Z7 and what people are doing with it, but it has been out for a while now and there is hardly a single clip to be found on the internet. Is the market so different for these cameras that even the personalities of those buying the Z7 are not apt to posting clips? Or is it that there just are not that many of them out there? This price drop makes me wonder. But I have no idea how the price fluctuations work on these things. It is certainly interesting that there are quite a few people looking at posts about the Z7...

This looks to me like a normal price drop. Early adopters always pay a premium to be the first to have the gear and this looks no different to me except for the fact that it's a $1000 drop. Usually these things don't drop that quickly.
I'm beginning to wonder if Sony has something up their sleeves for NAB though since they seem to be blowing out their stock of FX7's and FX1's. Maybe they're just transitioning out of the non-Exmor chips. Who knows if the price drop on the Z7 and the clearing out of the FX1 & FX7 stock are related.

In Houston, the price has been $5700 for the past 3 or 4 weeks. Not sure if it was on the market before then.

I think I'm just going to stick with my FX1 and XH-A1 until somebody produces either a roughly comparable performance camera that records to non-proprietary flash memory (SDHC or CF) at a price between $3000-4000, or a camera with performance comparable to an EX1 that records to non-proprietary (SDHC or CF) flash memory at around $4000-5000.

I don't really want interchangable lenses, and I sure don't want to be purchasing way over priced flash memory cards. Fast CF or SDHC is quite adequate for recording 25-35mbps data streams. I sure won't pay more than 10 times as much to be able to off load to computer a bit faster.

As it is, I'm getting awfully tempted to take a trip down to the University of Minnesota and see if I can find an engineering student to make a firewire to CF recorder for my current cameras, as a class project or something.

I jumped the gun and picked up a the Z7 today. Hopefully things will turn out alright. If Sony starts selling those CF writers outside of the S270/Z7 packages, then I'll have to pick up another for my A1U to salvage that machine.

I'd be surprised if Sony pulled a fast one on everyone who just purchased the Z7 at NAB, but I can definitely see them releasing something to replace the A1U with possibly some similar features. Maybe the price drop is just to remain competitive with the other manufacturers or to create a larger separation between the EX1 and the Z7U which is probably hurting sales on both ends.