A few months ago, we picked up a few Silicon Power Class 10 16GB SDHC cards to compliment the Transcend 16GB Class 6 cards we already owned.

Recently we’ve rolled some long shots on our Sony EX1 using the new Silicon Power cards in our e-Films MxR adapters, and disaster: the camera would give us media record errors consistently after recording for about ten minutes or so.  The Transcend cards were still okay though, so it couldn’t be the camera.

After poking around the internets, we found that Sony had released an firmware version 1.2 for the EX1.  We were still using 1.12.  According to Sony, SxS-1 memory card support was added, as well as official support for SDHC recording.  Perfect.  Sony now allows end users to upgrade their own firmware, so we upgraded the camera using Sony’s versionUp tool (which works on both Mac and PC), tested the Silicon Power cards – and no issue whatsoever.

What’s more, we can now reliably record 60/30fps S&Q footage to the SDHC cards!  Before this was impossible – we’d hit media record errors very quickly if we had tried doing that.

We’re very happy that Sony released this updated firmware, allowing us to reliably use low-cost SDHC cards for recording.

Find the updated firmware at Sony Canada’s e-Support site.  http://support.sonybiz.ca/esupport/eSupportHome.asp