This offer on 16GB compact flash good until Thursday (January 31, 2008)
 

I just ordered two 16 gigabyte compact flash cards with this offer:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...Elite_Pro.html

The $85 per card rebate is good until Thursday (January 31, 2008) and there is a limit on two cards with this rebate. This offer will give you 32 GB of non-tape storage for a Z7 or S270 for about $310. I paid another $10 for shipping bringing my total to $320 after rebates.

This isn't too bad when you consider that two 16 GB cards for an EX-1 would run you $1750.

This will give me 140 minutes of shooting time which I think is enough for a day most of the time.

By the way, my last name being "Kingston" is just a coincidence, but I'm kind of happy to have it printed on the label of the memory cards none-the-less.

That's a pretty good price for 16 GB cards.

I would seriously consider the EX-1 but the price of the cards, wow.

I have the same concerns as you.

Let's say you go an a trip for two weeks as an example. Let's say you don't want to bring a laptop (in my case I don't even own a laptop). What are you going to do with the Sony SBP-16 16GB SxS PRO Memory Card after you shoot one hour with it ?

At least with CF cards, you could download the video to one of these guys.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...00_7_in_1.html

Unless the price of the SxS cards come way down in price, how can I seriously consider buying an EX-1 even though I would love to.

Adam

I don't think that device would transfer the mpeg2 video unfortunately.

I just ordered one of these ultra-cheap 16GB Compact Flash cards:

http://www.ecost.com/Detail.aspx?edp=39001633

I read a user review which said that it worked well but transferred photos at about half the rate of more expensive cards (even though the specification said it was the same speed).

That review is here:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product...owViewpoints=1

If it isn't fast enough for the Z7 video, I'm sure it will work well in my Marantz audio recorder. If it is, I might buy a bunch of them.

By the way, Transcend also has some pretty cheap SxS cards that would fit nicely in an EX1. Unfortunately, the EX1 firmware won't allow it. Hopefully future EX1 firmware updates won't be so picky:

http://www.ecost.com/Detail.aspx?edp=38347211

I expect that the card is plenty fast enough to support the 35mbps. It's just the copy protection that would keep it from working.

Check out this 32GB version:

http://www.ecost.com/Detail.aspx?edp=38347229

Unfortunately though, the reality comes down to the fact that if I got an EX1, I'd be down to an hour of shooting between transfers and I just couldn't do that.

Can the HVR-Z7 take the 32gb cards?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...P=OTC-SHOPPING

Laurence,

Whta file type would the Z7 create on the CF card ? Do you think it would be an .avi ?

I have a much smaller version of one of those portable CF card / hard disk transfer units and I want to put a small video on a CF card and try and see if I can successfully transfer the file off the card and onto the hard disk.

What do you know and hear about the Transcend CF cards ? I saw them for sale in a lot of places when I over in Europe but I never bought any.

Thanks.

Well 133x is officially the minimum speed, which gives you an upper write rate of 20Mb/s. HDV 1080i uses a recording data rate of 25 Mbit/s or 3.125 MB/s. Thus even though 133x is the minimum speed, it should be a little more than six times fast enough to handle the data stream.

Because of this, I would expect that any of the 133x compact flash cards should work pretty well for recording the video.

Now the Sony card which is coming out in April is a 300x card, so I expect that transfers from the card to your hard drive will be a lot faster. I also expect that it will be a lot more expensive.

I also think that it would be wise to reformat any of the low budget cards each time you reuse them. Yes they are fast enough, but the heavy fragmentation you would get after just deleting files a bunch of times might start to give you errors.

I expect that the Z7 and 270 will have no problem with 32GB Compact Flash cards even though in the specs they just mention 8GB & 16GB cards.

When I get my Z7 I will try the 16GB Transcend card I have on order. If it works well, I will probably order the 32GB version. Initially however, there is something kind of nice about one card per tape if you are recording to both formats simultaneously.

With the minimum speed 133x compact flash, transferring footage from the card should still be about six or seven times faster than capturing the footage from tape. From a Sony 300x card it should be lightning fast. All this is just theory though until we get our hands on this camera.