Press-Release
Why Hoodman Raw Memory Cards Are The Professional Photographer's 1st Choice!
Better is always better than bigger
Hoodman Corporation makes innovative digital camera accessories that make photography easier. Hoodman markets to the photo dealer channel… real camera stores. Hoodman got its start in 1986 in Hollywood making hoods for viewing monitors in the field… Television and Motion Picture Crews know Hoodman products well… you have seen the NFL instant replay hoods … Hoodman makes those too. 4 years ago Hoodman Corporation saw an opportunity to expand upon their photo dealer channel and jumped into the memory card business. You might ask yourself why any small accessory company would think its route to success would be to enter into a marketplace dominated by two billion dollar giants. … Sandisk and Lexar started the memory card business. Well the short of it is that Sandisk and Lexar were abandoning the photo dealer channel and concentrating on mass merchants… With stock holders to report to, the giants could have 6 people cover the photo dealer channel and bring in 100 million dollars a year or the same 6 people could bring in 4 billion dollars a year in the mass merchant channel. Sandisk and Lexar both built their memory cards off shore. Mass merchant sales took off and economies of scale in production helped keep profit margins looking good. Unfortunately, the mass production came with a cost… Memory Card Reliability. The down fall of any memory card maker is the dreaded card failure. Mass merchant customers may never take a $25,000 photograph… so if they have card failures and lose all their pictures… no huge problem. Professional photographers on the other hand cannot afford failures… ever.
The marketing was nothing new for Hoodman. Let’s make the cards better than our competitors are willing to make their cards. Professionals can identify value and are willing to pay extra for better products so we can position as the premium memory cards sold only at the photo dealer. Hoodman felt that they would need a manufacturing partner that was in the USA and could guarantee Zero in field failures. Finding the right manufacturing partner was critical… Silicon Valley was where Hoodman found the state of the art USA facility that would be able to produce the superior memory cards Hoodman needed. RAW was the brand name that was chosen to cover the Hoodman memory card line. “Shoot RAW on RAW” made sense since pros shot RAW files and the performance of RAW memory cards from Hoodman would deliver exactly what pros needed… performance and reliability.
Using its existing photo dealer channels, Hoodman pitched the RAW memory made in the USA to dealers with great success… Dealers particularly came on board when told that they would never have to meet the price of a mass merchant store because RAW was unlike its competitors and would not be sold to mass merchants. 4 years later, through the toughest economic times in 60 years, Hoodman RAW has carved a solid nitch as the premium memory card in the Photo Dealer Channel. Hoodman still has Zero in Field failures on its RAW line. Hoodman has a RAW Shooter Roster on their website with testimonials of over 20 great photographers on the lecture circuit who shoot RAW memory cards exclusively.
Innovation and building cards better than the competitors are willing to make their memory cards is alive and well within the Hoodman RAW line. Hoodman’s latest memory card improvement is installing SSD flash(enterprise flash) in their CompactFlash cards. SSD flash was designed to replace hard drives in computers…(it had to be faster and more reliable) The SSD flash component in Hoodman’s RAW 8 GB and 16 GB CompactFlash memory cards is rated to last 500,000 cycles (a cycle being fill the card and then reformat = 1 cycle) by comparison Sandisk extreme III cards use flash that will only last 10,000 cycles. Sandisk extreme IV cards use flash that will only last 100,000 cycles. The likelihood of a card failure is much greater on the 10K and 100K competition. 500K flash costs more to make… Hoodman is betting your photography and its reputation for Zero in field failures is worth it.
By the way, if you need customer support at Hoodman, you can call 800.818.3946 and a live Hoodman customer service person will pick up the phone and help you 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday pacific standard time.