Convergent Design has announced the Flash XDR, a CompactFlash based HD field recorder. Recording to solid-state flash memory has a ton of advantages. For starters, you no longer have to worry about hard drive heads being damaged if it falls, and the low-power consumption means the included battery will last 8 hours. The Flash XDR features two hot-swappable CF slots, and with CompactFlash cards already at 16GB and reaching for 32GB, you are looking at a ton of recording time. However, all these features come at a price.
Your camcorder is connected to the Flash XDR via HD-SDI, and can be recorded to HDV, XDCAM HD, or 50Mbps 4:2:2 quality. If you take out one of the memory cards, the Flash XDR will automatically start recording to the second card. This allows you to begin editing or transferring video to a laptop or other storage device for immediate archiving and editing.
The Convergent Design Flash XDR will ship this Fall for $4995, no small price to pay, but completely worth it for many applications.
