Raul,

I get identical results using both SanDisk and Transcend. If I'm shooting 30p, I can overcrank to 52 without problems. If I'm shooting 24p, I can overcrank to 43.

In the PAL world, you should be able to overcrank to 44 (shooting 25P).

Today I just received my Kensington from cyberport in Germany. Maybe it's of interest.

Hmm, either EX user demand is too small or Sony made them an offer to stop . . . or maybe they've got something coming up that's a few mm shorter.

Just landed a big and presitgeous corporate job today and with all the talk of the Kensington 7 in 1 reader maybe being discontinued/no longer made I bought another one via amazon uk market place this afternoon before supply dries up in Europe. It's so cheap, why not? (until something better performing comes along).

This time I've paired it with the much discussed Transend 16GB SDHC Class 6 card (the last one I bought was with a Sandisk 16GB Ultra II SDHC....that gave me some error hiccups right at the start ....but had been absolutely rock solid ever since - see earlier posts from me on this thread - pages 56 to 58).

This is more for a "I've another hours worth in the bag if I need it peace of mind type thing" just to supplement the approx. 2.5 hours I currently have (3 off SxS 8GB cards and 1 off SDHC 16GB mentioned above).

The price of both was peanuts but of course I'll test this new SDHC all out before use in any serious action. The well shared experience in this thread suggest it'll be perfect for Full HQ shooting with my Sony EX3 without overcranking too far (my current SDHC stick with the Sandisk Ultral II will hit 50 fps reliably in my PAL EX3).

Thanks again guys, I'd buy you all a beer but with the UK tax on it having just been raised AGAIN today (8%!) to fund our latest economic gamble I can now not afford 1043 pints!!!

transcend
 

thank U Ted!Good to know.I guess best route to go with transcend then as they a little cheeper too.




Raul

Yeah! What the hell! My order got canceled too. I called Kensington, product is discontinued. He said that it's just been out now for a while and sales have been weak, but he said that he put a word in with his super and haven't heard back. Don't know if that means anything?
Are there any others out there.
Would this work?
Belkin Multimedia Reader and Writer ExpressCard XD/MM/SD/MS F5U213

Today I drove 3 hours to micro center in San Jose to pick up the last two Kensington 7 in 1's they had in stock. I got lucky and it was well worth the drive, plus I ended up getting a good deal on the last model MBP.
The sales reps there claimed other people had come in today to buy the cards which I had on lay away and had paid for...glad I drove down there today and grabbed them!

I tested the Belkin and it would not work.

Larry that was me that came in looking for the Kensington 7 yesterday in San Jose, i live their. i own an EX3. Micro center told me that 2 were coming in Friday but i was not in a hurry to check because my order from amazon was shipped and should be arriving today. Micro center told me it was on hold for pickup. Glad to see you got it, but keep checking they told me would be getting more in the next couple of days, but that they only get 2 at time. I did not get an absolute answer this time. Ill post here when i find out they have them in, in case your are interested. I usually shop their.

and I haven't even had the time to get the firmware upgrade (not willing to risk the one month turnaround from NJ).

As to Kensington discontinuing the 7 in 1, apparently the EX is a small market and the number of EX users who know this is very small. I often run in to other EX shooters on "news" shoots that I do. In every case not any other EX shooter was aware of the SDHC option. Keep in mind that Sony markets their hard drive solution. No one "markets" the Kensington solution other that a few of us here on this and a couple of other forums.

The SDHC solution is/was great for news/doc type shooting were having lots of record time without the need to bring/offload to a laptop. But as I noted above, the very shooters who would most benefit from this are not aware of this solution in my anecdotal experience.

I do hope for a solution.

SDHC cards
 

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

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. Here in the UK I can buy a 16gb Transcend card for £20 and the 7 in 1 card for £14 - total £34. The Sony 16 gb card is approx £585. In my view this is a rip off to the customers who are supporting them with their camera purchase.

Sony are not the only company ripping off the consumer, it would seem that anything with the word "digital" in it will be subject to a higher price, and guess what we all seem to cough up the extra cash each time. Maybe this global money crisis will bring us and the manufacturers back down to the real world again.

two days was trying to find kensington , the only place was amazon UK, but they don't ship to Canada,
just bought siig 11 in 1 on ebay, as soon as I'll get it will test and let you know,
cheers

I tried a SIIG - not sure if it was the 11-in-1 model, but it did not work. Neither does the SanDisk adapter (but it does work to transfer SDHC cards to the laptop).

Look, if Amazon is positively out of Kensington, then you can get an emergency substitute that is not as trouble-free, unfortunately, but it does work.

It's Cables Unlimited adapter

Problem with that is, camera does not always recognize it as easily and readily as it did with Kensington. So CU adapter requires fiddling - reinserting in tinto the slot... rebooting the cam... until it sees the adapter.

Now, once it sees it, and you don't take it out or switch the camera off, everything works fine, in my experience.

Use at your own risk blah blah...

Vincent
Maybe... a big maybe.
Did you check out the prices of the latest Panasonic 64GB P2 card?
Costs more than many of the cameras we talk about here.
Kinda like the cost of gas - whatever the market will bear...
And the price of cars - if you saw the news shows/docs about all those new cars arriving every day and just sitting there...
Maybe if nobody actually bought the cards, instead of talking about not buying them, then there would be a special price/discount sale?
Until the stock got sold, of course...

We are happy with Sony because they deliver exceptional quality cameras for affordable prices. Many thought it unbelievable that a camera under 15-20K could bring what the EX1 brought.
It appears that the high cost of the card is supposed to make up for the relative low price of the camera. It's in a sense what film was to the Polaroid camera, ink to the printer.

Someone found a way around the S&S cards. Sony not happy. I probably would not have bought the cam without this alternative. I'm happy. Sony sells more cameras. They're happy. Eventually prices will drop for the S&S cards. We will start buying them. And we all lived happily everafter.

No doubt the price of cards will drop eventually, but it nearly put me off purchasing the EX3, I had considered the Z7 as an alternative. However, a quick hands on experience told me that the EX3 was the camera I wanted. I will pay the £585 for a single 16gb card, just so I can use the Q&S feature, but will use the Transcend cards for other work.

The EX3/EX1 does offer exceptional value for money and I guess the extra £585 will be recovered on just one job.

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.

Extending on that, I back up to 2 drives (always from Clip Browser) and on my bigger jobs, have my clients purchase a big WD MB 800fw or Lacie TI external HDD to put the edit on to so we can revisit at a later date. I use those drives to copy the original SxS recordings as well so I can keep my backup costs to a reasonable level.

That being said, I picked up 2 new 750Gb Seagates for the US equivalent of about $55.00.

The 704 is MLC where 702 model is faster (and more expensive) SLC...
specs were hard to find so I emailed A-DATA:
"E701and E702 read / write speed is 30MB / 13MB,
E703 and E704 read / write speed is 13MB / 5MB."

I have no idea what the sustained write speed of 702 is, but specification's 13mb is pretty close of 15mb class 4 SDHC specification. So if anyone have easy access to some 702s or 701s please test them... they just might work.

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 have tried and reported over a month ago the 16GB version A-DATA does not work in the EX1

Which version? atleast both 702 and 704 have 16gb. And as I previously stated they have large speed difference. 704 won't work for sure but 702 sails exactly at the limits.

I had a hope that the "new" SDHC thread would summarize the old one. For example, buy this card and this adapter. Plus a listing of any shortcomings or issues involved with using SDHC cards. I really didn't want to read through all 1000+ postings on the other thread. Surely there is a consensus opinion by now of what works well and what doesn't work.

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!

Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo's also work in the Kensington adapter and I have received a tip-off that the following combination also works:
Sony VGP-MCA20 5-in-1 Memory Card Adapter with Sony MSHX8G PRO-HG Duo HX 8 GB.

I have not tried this combo myself, but have been told it works with the same restrictions as with SD cards BUT the door on the EX1 will close over this combo.

cards ...
 

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!!!

Anyone tried the Sonnet adapter?

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?

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

John

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

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

Paul

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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,

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