Ever since the release of the Panasonic AF100 camera, I have been shooting lots of jobs with it. This has been a departure from my P2 workflow somewhat.
First, I no longer need to bring my PCD35, as my i7 MacBook Pro has a built in SD card slot. Secondly, I am not swapping and offloading as many cards as I do with P2, since I can get 3 hours on a single 32GB card.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love P2, and would buy a AF200 or whatever Panasonic might call a larger sensor camera with a P2 recording mechanism in a heartbeat. But they don’t offer me that option now.
With P2, I never worried about card corruption or physical damage, because the P2 cards are practically bullet proof. I was not running on that same level of confidence with the SD cards. The sheer fragility of such a small card concerned me. I have heard of horror stories about corrupt cards that cannot be read after shooting, and once experienced that myself. Luckily that was only under test conditions.
Panasonic has put my fears aside with the release of their new Pro series SD cards. These cards offer more safety features than P2 cards. For example, the new Pro SD cards are water proof, heat proof, x-ray proof, shock proof and magnetic proof.
The cards use a SICS processor (super intelligent controller system) which allows for smart data writing, power failure protection, and refresh. This gives the card a long life span. You can read about these features in detail here.
Another feature that is unique to these pro cards is the inclusion of a QR code, unique to each card. This means that tracking the cards might be possible via a smart phone. I say might, because I tried scanning the very small code with my iPhone 3GS, and it was not able to scan it.
On top of all that goodness, is the speed factor. This cards have a read speed of 90MB/s. In my real world tests, that makes these cards twice as fast as my Panasonic class 10 gold cards.
According to Panasonic, In order to use the card checker software or the file recovery software (available here) you need to use the new Panasonic BNSDCMAB UHS-1 Adapter. This adapter uses USB 3.0 to achieve the fastest throughput. Running at USB 2 speeds will not get you 90MB/s.
In my testing, with my i7 15” MBP, I was able to recover files from the built in SD slot in the laptop, but the Card Checker software would not see the cards. I will test with the USB later and report back my results.
The model numbers and prices are as follows:
8GB: $60 RP-SDB08G1K
16GB: $129 RP-SDB016G1K
32GB: $245 RP-SDB032G1K
These cards are more money than some other cards out there. A Transcend 16GB Class 10 card can be had for as little as $25, so the 8GB pro card at $50 street is twice as much. In my opinion, the features of these new cards far out way the small premium they command.
One last note. There are gold series UHS1 cards from Panasonic that offer 90MB/s of throughput that some might confuse with the Pro cards. These gold cards have many of the pro features, but lack the QR code, and the Card Checker software.
