SDHC substitute for SxS cards

[Dean Harrington]

Originally Posted by Giroud Francois

they could simply make a bundle of a rebadged Sandisk 16gig ultra II card +their adapter, call it eXFilm or something like this.
I am even surprised that no chinese guy has not yet started to advertise for low cost fake SxS. Just glue a shaved SDHC in a kensington, change the sticker... et voila !

Just how hard is it to make a real working equivalent to SXS? Kensington was almost there w/50 fps ... how hard is it to get up to speed? A chinese entrepreneur ... hell, any entrepreneur ... would be able to sell a ton of such cards at a reasonable price!

[Ted OMalley]

Originally Posted by Dean Harrington

Just how hard is it to make a real working equivalent to SXS? Kensington was almost there w/50 fps ... how hard is it to get up to speed? A chinese entrepreneur ... hell, any entrepreneur ... would be able to sell a ton of such cards at a reasonable price!

The trick is to get away from the USB bus - which all of these adapter solutions have been so far. The bottleneck is in the EX1/3 implementation of the USB bus, not the card/reader combo.

So, the question is, who can made an Expresscard with memory using the PCIe bus. That will be a sought after solution - full overcranking on a generic card. It doesn't have to be that fast, even - the current SxS are WAY faster than we are using.

[Robert C. Fisher]

Well apparently it's not as easy as it looks. The SxS cards read & write at 100MB/sec or 800Mb. The real killer is the write speed. Also the other thing is the SxS trade mark, is it open sourced or is it owned by Sony?

In my earlier discussion with the gentleman from Delkin the Really Fast memory they use in the SxS cards is really expensive right now, low quantities manufactured. That will change in the future but that's the deal right now. On the other hand there is no reason for pricing the SxS cards so high except to recoup their R&D costs but I haven't seen any indication that the prices will drop, even the Sandisk branded SxS cards are pretty close to the Sony cards in retail cost. Delkin did say that they have a express card memory card that reads at 50MB and writes at 27MB which is more than fast enough but the big question is the controller compatible with Sony's firmware, if so that could be a viable alternative in the near future for those of us who need moderately fast memory for everyday shooting. He had said that he has sent a few out for testing.

I would love to get my hands n one or two of those!

Time will tell.

[Brian Rhodes]

I should have one real soon to test.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/sony-xdca...ress-card.html

[Joe Lawry]

Just got my Delkin combo's up and running finally with Ultra II cards.

Recorded 15 minutes straight and then started swapping between the slots, each with a delkin and an ultra II in it and it was fine for normal swaps.. did that about 3 more times over the course of 5 minutes.

I then tried to break it.. hit the slot select button a number of times straight after each other, and after about the 3rd change in 5 seconds i got a media error. Which is what i was expecting.. its not normal thing to happen.

But apart from that they seem all good. Im going to do all my testing with my new ex1 using them and not the 8 and 16 i got with it. Will save those for my first shoot over new years. Hopefully i'll have a better idea when it comes to the Delkins by then and might even use them.

[Gints Klimanis]

Originally Posted by Robert C. Fisher

Well apparently it's not as easy as it looks. The SxS cards read & write at 100MB/sec or 800Mb. The real killer is the write speed. Also the other thing is the SxS trade mark, is it open sourced or is it owned by Sony?

What's your source for the 100 MB/sec? Earlier this year, a few of us compared write speeds with various methods. The fastest transfer method was something like 45 MB/second with the SxS in the ExpressCard slot of a Mac PowerBook. The Sony USB reader was slower.

[Robert C. Fisher]

100MB/sec was derived from the 800Mb/sec spec that Sony published. This is a pro card which means Sony has a road map for utilizing the card over a period of time. You really start to need the speed when you start using codec data rates 50Mb and above. I would assume Sony wants to grow into the card by utilizing for the next XDCam HD camera. The current one records 1080/24-30 4.2.2 at 50Mb/s. That is about the limit with the BD media they are using now. With the XDR recorders working at 100Mb Sony will have to compete with that.

Anything on the USB bus is slower, USB is not a good bus for storage but has grown into that use since it's really cheap. Firewire is a much better bus for storage since it's processor independent.

The slow speed you got on the MacBook Pro PCe slot is due to it's PCe bus being pretty slow but it's real fast for a laptop. I think using a raid the fastest speed out of the MB Pro is only 150MB/s to a SATA array.

[Chris Paporakis]

Thanks for your help Steven and Robert, panicked there for a while, tried again the next morning, the other 3 cards formatted in about 2 sec each and then a bit hesitantly put the card in that originally got stuck, that also formatted in 2 sec ?? Don't know what happened there BUT there all working which is great.

Have left the Kensington card in the camera, with the original Sony 8 GB, door closes fine, the other 4 Transcend 16 Gb cards live in there little pelican Box, which I love, should be a must buy for everyone, it can carry 4 cards in isolated splendor AND you can stack 16 !! cards on the other side !

So you could have 20 16 Gb cards in this tiny waterproof box, 20 hrs of filming in a tiny shock and waterproof container, or 40 hrs of footage in it when the 32 GB cards become more available and cheaper.

Its a brave new world, so much more compact than carrying tapes for a big trip, then the only thing you need to worry about on extended wilderness trips is the matter of charging the batteries, a solar charger ?

Cheers

chris

[Brent Ethington]

FYI - amazon.com shipped some Kensington cards today. Not sure of their stock status

[Alex Raskin]

OK people, Kensington adapters are available at Amazon right now, in stock, and actually shipping - I just got an email that mine has shipped today!

The catch? Apparently, only one adapter can be ordered at once.

Sony EX1 cams can still be ordered in any quantity though :)

[Chris Hurd]

Just experimenting with an idea to make this whole thing much easier to understand... the link to our quick SDHC for SxS summary is now posted at the top of every page in this thread. We're also working up an article which expands that summary quite a bit (many thanks to Brian & others who are helping out with this!) and that link, when it's ready, will go into that notice at the top of every page here. In other news, I'll be talking to the company I mentioned earlier (it's not Delkin) about a new Express card adapter -- will let you know how that pans out. Hope this helps,

[Steven Thomas]

Originally Posted by Robert C. Fisher

Delkin did say that they have a express card memory card that reads at 50MB and writes at 27MB which is more than fast enough but the big question is the controller compatible with Sony's firmware, if so that could be a viable alternative in the near future for those of us who need moderately fast memory for everyday shooting. He had said that he has sent a few out for testing.

We already know the problem is the bottleneck in the limitation Sony has put on the USB datarate transfer using USB via expresscard.

We've confirmed that the SDHC + adapter combination meets the SanDisk Ultra II SDHC 15MB/s datarate when reading and writing in a PC expresscard (USB) reader.

The limitation from the Sony is around 8.5MB/s. In order for us to reach full overcrank at 24P 60FPS, we need at least 12.5MB/s. SDHC should be able to do this, but it's obvious that Sony limited the datarate.

Oddly, this limitation "appears" to be causing the problem with their own PHU-60K capture drive.

[Steven Thomas]

Thank you Chris!

[Brian Luce]

So why do we want that $400 super fast card from Delkin when the cheap ones work just as good?

[Robert C. Fisher]

so you don't have to buy the $900 SxS card for over/under cranking. Hopefully it will work for that, since the EX1/3's data rate is pretty low to start with.