Well, just as promised, Ikonoskop has released the much anticipated PCIe/Express Card reader for their proprietary cards. Here’s the announcement from their news site:
The A-Cam dll Express Card Reader is our fastest card reader, it will transfer up to 40fps or 130 MB/s to a fast harddrive or SSD. The reader is connected to a MacBook Pro 17” or the older 15” MacBook Pro with OSX Lion via the ExpressCard slot. It can also be used on any Thunderbolt Mac with Lion and Sonnet’s Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter. You can also playback and color correct the footage in DaVinci Resolve or Resolve Lite 8.1 directly from the cardreader. There is also a PCIexpress version available.
Order it now!
Shipping starts in February.
Price: 690 Euro
By my calculations that 130MBps (big B) means that an 80GB card should off-load in about 10min! While it is only a little better than real-time (80GB holds 15min of footage) compare that to the HOUR + it took with USB and you’ve got an incredibly valuable piece of hardware.
I’ve already contacted Ikonoskop to ensure there’s one in my kit.
Since the MacBook Pro “Core 2 Duo” 3.06 17” Mid-2009 was the last Macbook Pro to feature an ExpressCard/34 slot and the MacBook Pro “Core i5” 2.3 13” Early 2011 was the first Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt, people with anything are kind of SOL.There’s two good options here - any Macbook Pro 17” model has the ExpressCard/34 slot, so the adapter will work directly with that.
For those with Thunderbolt enabled Macs, the Sonnet Thunderbolt to ExpressCard/34 adapter should be a great solution. Fortunately this plus a Thunderbolt cable can be had for under $200 total. Picked one of each of those up as well from B&H.
My biggest hope is that the shorter off-load time is sufficiently quick to have a DIT off-load a card while another is being used for shooting. While it isn’t as nice as having many hours worth of shooting media, I just can’t invest another $3,000 for 2 more 160GB cards right now.
Source: ikonoskop.com
