Nathan, sorry to burst your bubble, but a boat is not so tough location to shoot. For some reality check I would advise you to haul your stuff to 14 000 or 20 000 ft with temps 20F to -20F (and wind) and see how much downloading are you able to do? I spent 6 days on Rainier this summer, also one week in Denali range and 2 weeks in Canadian Rockies shooting a documentary. I had one person as help (as permits allowed), so maybe you can explain it to me how to implement a workflow with a computer in the field?

Try shooting in a dark presentation room with internationally noted dignitaries speaking for over five straight hours and being located in a packed elbow to elbow press area. A bright laptop screen is not acceptable. There is no place to place the laptop. I use a very small dim LED light to check the camera and change the card.

Try shooting in a public area in which there's no place to securely place a laptop.

Try doing a small corporate shoot under crazy tight deadline with extremely fast location moves. That laptop becomes a real boat anchor if one person must pay attention to it constantly and carefully verify copies.

I spent the first year I had the EX1 (Dec 2007-Dec 2008) using the laptop method (no other choices) and the 2nd year (Jan 2009 to present) carrying enough SDHC cards to feel secure in not bringing a laptop or tying up an assistant or worrying the file copy had an undiscovered issue. The latter was a major relief.

While your point on quality media is well-taken, we are not convinced that the flash media in Sony SxS is better than Sandisk media. The cost of the SxS is the on-board memory controller that probably handles two banks of flash memory. The real gain in SxS *was* its read speed or 40 MB/Sec.

William, why do you need to buy them locally? I just did a shoot with a mix of one San Disk Extreme III 30 MB/sec and two Transcend Class 6 16 GB Green stripe . Both Transcend cards, which had worked in the past, showed the Media Restore error.

While there may not be a defense for the SDHC manufacturer criticized by William, it is not clear to us that cheaper flash media equals lower quality. Samsung, Toshiba and SanDisk are three major flash manufacturers. Since you never see Samsung or Toshiba selling flash cards, where does their product go? It's in their OEM flash disk drives and the flash cards sold by Transcend, Pretec, Lexar, et al. A lower flash card price also reflects lower distribution costs, fewer product offerings and overall, the price structure of an efficient company.

We should be distinguishing single-level cell (SLC) industrial grade and multi-level cell (MLC) consumer grade:

http://www.supertalent.com/datasheet...whitepaper.pdf

Just a quick housekeeping note: I have cleaned up this thread somewhat.

For future reference, when a thread is high-jacked, please report it using
the Report Post function (it's the little "!" icon found to the left of every
post). Thanks in advance. Proceed with caution. Thanks William for your
patience.

Thanks Chris.....no biggie, as life is what it is.......but I will remember the little red button in the future.

Gints, points well received. Thanks for sharing.

Robert, Never said I shoot tough locations. Craig suggested that I probably only shoot studio, so I clarified. Thats all.