I would be really careful about which card you buy. I bought two Kingston Memory 16GB compact flash cards and even though they are 133x and make the minimum specification, they are not fast enough to work reliably with the Z7. I gave one to my daughter for her SLR camera and put the other in my Epson scanner so that I can scan without the computer, but I wouldn't have bought them had I known I couldn't use them with my Z7.

The much cheaper Transcend on the other hand works flawlessly.

The A-Data card is a 133x-20MB/sec. card.

In testing, the card had a sync issue of 0.9 seconds parallel to tape in one run, and 1.4 in another.

In addition, it had 2 dropouts in one of four tests and it locked up and froze in another.

It seems like the manufacturer's speed ratings (ala 133X) are based entirely on read speed (which is always faster than write speed). From what I've seen elsewhere, the write speeds vary dramatically (from brand to brand) for any given mfg speed rating. Did you do any write speed benchmark tests on the cards Marshall?

Large CF Cards
 

I was wondering if there were any issues writing to 32GB cards as these are the only ones I was going to consider using. I need to record long form. Some Sony rep I spoke with recently reckons you can't record to anything over 16GB, but according to everyone here is it possible to record 2.7 hours on a 32GB card? How do you record continuously while swapping tapes out for dual backup? Is this possible? I am planning to purchase two of these soon. Are they awesome cams?

To a degree I did, but since I couldn't measure the write speed for the camera itself it wasn't as much of a concern. You will notice a substantial difference, though, among all of the cards. There's very little consistency, unfortunately.

Some people have had good success with the AData cards; they failed some of my tests, however. You can use 32GB just fine as the minimum specs are only 133X-2G size. To film on both but being able to change tape, read the manual, but there's a setting in the camera to do this; just don't sync them together.

Transcend 32gb test
 

Just tested 32gb Transcend CF card that was delivered yesterday. I buttoned my Z7 on and off a few times during the 3hr test and the four clips ranged from 23 min to 1 hr 6 min.

All the HDV footage has now been transferred to hard drive via FCP log and transfer window. It shows up fine with no faults, green lines, broken code or other issues mentioned in posts.

Leaving the recorder rolling till the card was full, I recorded 2hrs 43 min and 20frames of HDV footage.

This was without shooting tape. I'll test with tape next plus will test the cache recording function (does cache work while shooting tape as well? What happens to timecode?)

On the desktop the recorder shows the footage to be 30.06gb in size.

Generally, having the ability to shoot for nearly three hours is a superb option but I am not very confident about shooting to CF alone and would definitely use tapes as well. That way, a back up and archiving solution is taken of.

Mickey

With my Transcend 32Gb's I'm getting an occasional clip with missing timecode, and several with a green start. Recording to tape in synchro mode and I think the problem lies in hitting the record button quickly after the previous clip - something that I have to do often filming weddings!

I had similar problems with the Transcend 32GB cards. I switched to Transcend 16GB 300x cards and so far I've had none of the problems that I had with the 32GB cards.