Saturday 21 May 2011

If The Cap Fits - EVF burn in

I got two emails recently on a related topic - so thought you might be interested...

The first email was from Al Bergstein...

"Hi, as a new owner of a xf305, I called Canon parts to order a evf [electronic viewfinder] plug to protect against the problem reported on the vimeo xf305 site, which documented burn in problems with the viewfinders. Canon's serviceman told me they fixed the problem in recent builds of the units, and that I would not need the caps. I notice you haven't covered this issue on your blog. Is there a reason for that? Can you confirm that the issue has been fixed through your contacts?"

Friday 20 May 2011

Speed Reading with Lexar USB 3.0

New Lexar USB CF and SD card reader
I have a couple of Lexar card readers for transferring video and stills from my Compact Flash cards onto my Mac. It connects via USB which is OK. I'd have preferred a FireWire version - but I couldn't find anyone who made them.

Luckily Lexar has announced it is launching a professional USB 3.0 Dual-Slot Reader that can potentially shift 500MBps. My USB 2.0 version is supposed to clock 60MBps - although in reality it is considerably slower than that thanks to the overhead of the USB protocol, which means that if all the planets are in alignment you might conceivably get up to half the advertised speed.