SDHC substitute for SxS cards

[Dean Harrington]

Originally Posted by Vincent Oliver

David, I do agree with you that the Sony cards should provide years of trouble free service, at least I would hope they do. My point was that they are expensive for what they are, I can't blame people for wanting to try out "cheaper" alternatives. However, I know from my own experience, that footage lost due to faulty tape, or in the case of the EX1/EX3 using cheaper cards, can be far more expensive than a good quality card. My clients will want to see footage rather than an apology for lost clips.

Based on your sound advice, I will bite the bullett and add a couple of Sony cards to my kit - I know I will not regret it in the long run.

Thanks

I've been using a Kensington 7-in-1 Media Reader and a SanDisk Ultra II 16GB/15MB SDHC Card that gives standard 30p in good order. I have 2 of these cards with 2 sandisk cards. Most footage gets recorded on these cards with under cranked footage being recorded on an 8 SXS card from the original purchase of an EX3. So far so good at 40 gigs of recording media. I have not had any problems!!!

[Alister Chapman]

Anyone tried the Sonnet adapter?

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Vincent Oliver

I am surprised that no one seems to be questioning why Sony charges so much for a 16gb card. I know it has a faster data transfer speed and higher specs. but this is no reason why the card should be so over priced.

I don't feel it is overpriced for what it is - the comparison needs to be the higher end SDHC/CF cards, and even then I don't think it's possible to get such with anything like the speed charecteristics of an SxS card. And reliably making a memory card to that spec I can well believe costs a lot of money.

But the real thing that the use of SDHC cards has shown up is that for most people, most of the time, that level of performance simply is not necessary. The real question should be why it's not simply possible to also buy a lower spec, lower priced card, in the same way as you can buy different categories of Compact Flash memory.

SxS cards are properly referred to as "SxS Pro", what many would like Sony to market would be a parallel range of "SxS Basic". Much lower speed (same as class 6 SDHC, say), but much lower price, yet still capable of basic recording at data rates of 50Mbs and below.

My suspicion is the money they'd lose through lost sales of the Pro cards would be more than made up by higher volume sales of the Basic cards, and more camera sales. (And therefore more card sales, and....)

In the (recent) past, Sony and Panasonic have publicly maintained that high cost cards such as P2 and SxS were necessary for recording high quality video. SDHC has proved that is no longer true. Has anybody been able to publicly pose this question to a senior representative?

[John Peterson]

Originally Posted by David Issko

Also Vincent do remember that provided you don't lose your SxS card(s), you should have MANY years of service from it/them. The initial purchase price will be all but a distant memory. I have 3 x 32Gb cards with a 4th coming next week and I have already been cycling them over and over. 116 mins per card in 1080i50 setting.

That's what I plan to do with my cheaper Sandisk and Transcend cards. Use them over and over.

John

[Anthony McErlean]

Originally Posted by Bruce Rawlings

Kensington 7-1 Express Reader/Sandisk 16gb Ultra IIs/ Extreme IIIs / Transcend 16gb class 6. (8gb versions of these cards also work fine.) These are the ones I use without trouble on an EX1 with the new 1.11 firmware upgrade. Do not rely on overcranking, use your real SxS cards for that. Easy Peasy. I think this is the gist of the long thread unless anyone knows better!

Yes, I think thats the idea of this thread. Working combination.

[Paul Newman]

Apiotek 24 in 1 Express Card Adapter EC-CR24 does NOT work with EX1 - "please change media" error.

Paul

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Alister Chapman

Anyone tried the Sonnet adapter?

Alister, Yes I did because their engineering is top notch.

Multimedia Memory Card Reader & Writer ExpressCard/34 (MMRW-E34)
FireWire/USB ExpressCard/34 (FWUSB2-E34)

Both these card were NOT recognized by my EX3.

[Brian Rhodes]

Chris can I post the link of all the data complied from this thread?
I will do update the spread sheet tomr.

[Chris Hurd]

Hi Brian, here it is:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/sony-xdca...sxs-cards.html

But what we really need is an article that we can host directly in DV Info Net's articles collection.

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Vincent Oliver

Just thought I would start a new thread as the original seems to have expanded beyond a reasonable size.

Sorry, Vincent -- trust me, what is worse than trying to follow a long thread is trying to follow multiple threads. My experience, having been at this for eight years is that it's better to keep everything under one roof.

Originally Posted by Greg Laves

I had a hope that the "new" SDHC thread would summarize the old one.

This is a work in progress which will probably need some additions and
corrections, but here it is (many thanks to Alex Raskin and Jay Gladwell):

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/sony-xdca...sxs-cards.html

[Vincent Oliver]

Originally Posted by Chris Hurd

Sorry, Vincent -- trust me, what is worse than trying to follow a long thread is trying to follow multiple threads. My experience, having been at this for eight years is that it's better to keep everything under one roof.

Fair enough Chris, but at 1074 posts under one thread I think your readers are going to find it hard to find the relevant information.

[Alex Raskin]

Hey Chris, thanks for the sticky. I'm sure it'll help people who are just discovering this thread (and trend.)

I'd like to acknowledge all great people here who pioneered this technique, and particularly Steven Thomas, Alister Chapman, Brian Rhodes for all the time and money invested in experimentation and contributions to this thread.

Many thanks to all.

[Brian Rhodes]

CHRIS I wrote an article over a month ago I sent it to you via email with the link it was a PDF file with all data compliled.

[Chris Hurd]

Brian, can you please send it to me again -- I just looked through my email and could not find it. Please use this address: chris at dvinfo dot net -- I'll be sure to look out for it. Thanks in advance,

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Vincent Oliver

... at 1074 posts under one thread I think your readers are going to find it hard to find the relevant information.

You have a good point. I've added a link with the "summary
sticky" to the first post... maybe that will help some folks.