WOW! If this card is everything it claims to be, at a reasonable price, my XDR is going to fall in love with it. Caught the announcement on Engadget:

Silicon Power crams 128GB into 400x Compact Flash card: a world's first -- Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/19/silicon-power-crams-128gb-into-400x-compact-flash-card-a-world/)

Hi Aaron-
We are tyring to get one to test with the nano/XDR. On paper it looks like a fantastic card. Two 128GB cards provides 10.5 hours of 50 Mbps 422 recording (nano) or a whopping 21 hours record time in the XDR.

Cheers-

Mike, the holy grail for me is to be able to continue to cover my events that I do today, but without stopping the camera. They are 4hours long and I can't record in highest quality without a card swap. With these cards I'd be able to do that.

I recently solved the power problem by buying an Anton Bauer x4 battery holder with a 4pin XLR power output. This is a slick little device that can carry any 4 Anton Bauer batteries.

Maybe you guys made the right decision to go with CF instead of power hungry, fragile hard drive technology. Now if you can just get them striped up!

Anyway, I'm looking forward to your review of the cards!

Hi Aaron:
Yeah, get four of these in the XDR and all your storage needs for principal photography per day shoot are solved.

Here are the specs from the Silicon Power site. I'm a little worried that they list the number of insertion failures, but not read/write cycles. Is this another MLC card with a high level of parallelism to acheive the 90 MB/sec write speed?

http://www.silicon-power.com/...?no=20100114001&start=0&currlang=utf8

Wonderful ... but I'm sure it will be expensive ... at least around $4-500 per card. Not a bad state for the solid recording push we've seen in the industry. 2 of these babies can record at 100mg HD in the nanoflash all day long ... nice!

Hmmm,

64GB of P2 is currently about $915
32GB of SxS is currently $579

So I'd say these units still look like a relative bargain by comparison.

Hi Perrone:
Is a 64 GB P2 card really $915.00 US ? If so, to hell with the P2 format ! Does Panasonic want anyone to actually adopt their format ? Although I really like the Panasonic HVX 200 A camera. If you say $500.00 US for the 128 GB CF card, then Im sure the street price in Canuk bucks in Montreal will be close to $700.00 CAN. 4 x $700.00 = $2,800.00 CAN ! I could almost purchase a Nano for that kind of dough. Memory prices always seem to head in one direction however - Down ! Now all we have to do now is get CD to stripe those puppies in an XDR and then we're off to uncompressed recording territory :-) Oops ! I wrote the *un* word ! Sorry.

Hi Perrone:
Is a 64 GB P2 card really $915.00 US ? If so, to hell with the P2 format ! Does Panasonic want anyone to actually adopt their format ? Although I really like the Panasonic HVX 200 A camera. If you say $500.00 US for the 128 GB CF card, then Im sure the street price in Canuk bucks in Montreal will be close to $700.00 CAN. 4 x $700.00 = $2,800.00 CAN ! I could almost purchase a Nano for that kind of dough. Memory prices always seem to head in one direction however - Down ! Now all we have to do now is get CD to stripe those puppies in an XDR and then we're off to uncompressed recording territory :-) Oops ! I wrote the *un* word ! Sorry.

That was the cheaper of the cards. The one with the limited lifetime. The other one is even more expensive...

The cheaper card:
Panasonic | AJ-P2E064XG 64GB E-Series P2 Card | AJ-P2E064XG (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/618135-REG/Panasonic_AJ_P2E064XG_AJ_P2E064XG_64GB_E_Series_P2.html)

The more expensive one:
Panasonic | AJ-P2C064AG 64GB P2 High Performance | AJ-P2C064AG (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/591145-REG/Panasonic_AJ_P2C064AG_AJ_P2C064AG_64GB_P2_High.html)

Mind you, these cards were nearly $3k when released last year. Sonys SxS have somehow managed to get Panasonic to do the impossible... when they claimed for years that the exhorbitant P2 prices were because the technology was expensive and they had to charge that. Within a year of SxS being released prices were slashed by half. Now prices are competitive with SxS.

Until 2009, shooting 2 hours of 1080p on the HVX cost more than buying the camera.

Note the following article which was written in Apr. 2009. Says that the normal 32GB P2 card at that time was listing for $1650. That constitues about 32 minutes recording. So it would have cost $3300 for an hour and $6600 for 2 hours. SxS in the same timeframe was about $900 per hour.

http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/people/Panasonic-Bows-New-Low-Priced-E-Series-P2-Cards_10793.html

Hi Perrone:
That's just plain stupid ! Maybe my SD card recording device will have a larger market than I thought. (??). Go and get a Nano and plug that in with a couple of Sandisk Extreme III 32 GB cards. Wait a minute ? Doesn't the newer Panasonic cameras also have an SD card recording slot ?

Hi Perrone:
That's just plain stupid ! Maybe my SD card recording device will have a larger market than I thought. (??). Go and get a Nano and plug that in with a couple of Sandisk Extreme III 32 GB cards. Wait a minute ? Doesn't the newer Panasonic cameras also have an SD card recording slot ?

None of the P2 cameras have anything but P2. Panasonic's position has been that their pro level cameras must have pro level media. Regardless of cost. And that the buyer of their pro level cameras could afford the workflow. Or move to one of their HDV offerings.

Sony's SxS seem to have put a kink in that thought process. At first Panasonic scrambled to offer these "economy" class cards at half the price of the top spec cards. But users were incredulous. Now I see that the prices of the top spec cards are nearly the same as the economy ones. So within 18 months, Panasonic has suddenly figured out how to sell the P2 cards at almost 1/4 the price they had been commanding...

Nothing like a little price competitiveness to even up the market.

Being a recent NanoFlash adoptee, I'm still building up my 'stash' of CF cards. Wondering how large an inventory people are considering 'normal?'
After a few months with My EX camera, I settled at 5 hours of SxS cards (88 GB) as a reasonable amount for my normal package. (Some of my clients do a LOT of interviews, and this was the equivalent to a case of BetaSP 30's, which was a quantity that was seldom exceeded within a single shoot day) Of course I also added 3 Hoodman SDcard adapters, each with 16BG RAW cards as my 'overshooting insurance' beyond the SxS quota.
Though the SxS's were a bit pricey at the time, I'm definitely happy with this package size.
Now that I have the Nano, though, with the numerous possible resolutions, etc., I'm just wondering how many cards people are stocking up on. I guess this also involves figuring that 100Mbps is probably the 'sweet spot' in the case of doing a whole day of green screen interviews? - which equates to 320 - 384 GB of CF card capacity to keep around.
Does this make sense, or is it overkill?
PS - Nothing is worse than being on a P2 shoot at AVC100 with LONG interviews and having to try to cycle through cards while trying to 'double copy' them to two hard drives and stay ahead of the game!

Being a recent NanoFlash adoptee, I'm still building up my 'stash' of CF cards. Wondering how large an inventory people are considering 'normal?'
After a few months with My EX camera, I settled at 5 hours of SxS cards (88 GB) as a reasonable amount for my normal package. (Some of my clients do a LOT of interviews, and this was the equivalent to a case of BetaSP 30's, which was a quantity that was seldom exceeded within a single shoot day) Of course I also added 3 Hoodman SDcard adapters, each with 16BG RAW cards as my 'overshooting insurance' beyond the SxS quota.
Though the SxS's were a bit pricey at the time, I'm definitely happy with this package size.
Now that I have the Nano, though, with the numerous possible resolutions, etc., I'm just wondering how many cards people are stocking up on. I guess this also involves figuring that 100Mbps is probably the 'sweet spot' in the case of doing a whole day of green screen interviews? - which equates to 320 - 384 GB of CF card capacity to keep around.
Does this make sense, or is it overkill?
PS - Nothing is worse than being on a P2 shoot at AVC100 with LONG interviews and having to try to cycle through cards while trying to 'double copy' them to two hard drives and stay ahead of the game!

None of the P2 cameras have anything but P2. Panasonic's position has been that their pro level cameras must have pro level media. Regardless of cost. And that the buyer of their pro level cameras could afford the workflow. Or move to one of their HDV offerings.

Sony's SxS seem to have put a kink in that thought process. At first Panasonic scrambled to offer these "economy" class cards at half the price of the top spec cards. But users were incredulous. Now I see that the prices of the top spec cards are nearly the same as the economy ones. So within 18 months, Panasonic has suddenly figured out how to sell the P2 cards at almost 1/4 the price they had been commanding...

Nothing like a little price competitiveness to even up the market. Hi Perrone: Yup, just another example of big business greed. You can't trust them no matter what they say, or how hard they protest. Once there's an alternative out there then the big boys have to play nice again - It's that simple ;-) When the SDXC card format comes out at a debut size of 1 TB, then watch what they do ;-)

However, I do like the Panasonic stuff. The HVX 200 A is a nice P2 camera. I have to go google it to see if it has an HD-SDI out or even an HDMI, then you can use the more affordable (Ha ! I'd never thought I'd write this statement !) Nano Flash with it. I always thought the HVX 200 and 200 A cameras were supposed to be the *Prosumer* level P2 device of the line ??