Pentax DSLRs Require Fast Cards for A Bit Longer Video Recording!

Otherwise, it will end pre-maturely, within one minute! >:-(

I have a Sandisk Class 4 SDHC card in 8GB, which is normally used in my NEX. I record so many videos with my NEX without any problem and in any lengths, since I bought them back to July.

This weekend, I just swapped the Sandisk card into my K-x for use for some reasons. I was recording videos and suddenly found that the video recording always ended pre-maturely. When I reviewed back the video clips, I found that the recorded lengths of the videos were ranged from 53 to 56 seconds at most. Damn it!

So, this is what some people have been saying about the major problem of using Motion JPEG for video recording, which is without any video *motion* compression! As such, the bandwidth and requirement is just very high and it needs fast to very fast cards to be used in all those Pentax video-capable DSLRs so as to avoid buffer overflow. Otherwise, when the buffer is full, video recording will be stopped.

The worst is that after the video recording is stopped, it takes somehow a rather long time to complete the writing to the card after that. During which, only a sand-glass is displayed and the card access lamp lights up consistently.

On the other hand, I used to use another Class 6 8GB card in my K-x and I have never seen the same problem. So, my quick conclusion is that my K-x requires at least Class 6 cards in order to use the video feature. In contrast, the NEX, which has at least some kinds of video compressions, has no problem at all even with my that slower Sandisk card of Class 4 or maybe even Class 2 ones, I guess.

So, if you are going to use a K-5 for video recording, do buy only Class 10 cards and that is my humble advice! It is just because K-5 features 1920 x 1080(p or i?) Full HD video recording, but not only a 720p one which the K-x or the K-r has. As I said before, this must be a "ground-breaking" "innovation" by Pentax for being made the first video recording device on Earth which records in Full HD but without any option of video compression! :-o Frankly speaking, I do believe that the Pentax engineers had to resort to use a higher compression ratio in JPEG for video recording in order to lower the bandwidth, which is yet highly undesirable as the IQ of the still picture per frame of the video will suffer in the end!


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