Accessory Roundup: cards, card readers, and more

Images: Lexar, ACDSee, OWC

Happy weekend, everyone. It seems like there’s an interesting week ahead, but this past week was also quite a busy one for accessory makers. Today, we’re going to look at some cards, card readers, exciting software updates, and more. But first, as always, the deals:

Some great Nikon deals

Photo: Dan Bracaglia

For a while now, the Nikon Z5 – still one of the cheapest full-frame cameras ever released – has been on our Best Cameras under $1,500 buying guide thanks to its great ergonomics and stabilized sensor. It’s older, but we still think it’s a pretty solid buy for the money.

So imagine if it was $400 cheaper, coming in just under the $1,000 mark. Better yet, you don’t have to imagine – you can just go to your retailer of choice and see it for yourself because that’s the sale Nikon’s running right now.

$996 at B&H

$996 at Amazon

$996 at Adorama

Photo: Richard Butler

Speaking of cameras that rank highly on our buying guides, the Nikon Z8 is also on sale for $500 off. While the sale doesn’t knock it down an entire price bracket like with the Z5, it will still let you get a heck of a lot of camera for $3,500 right now.

Lower-end high-end cards

Image: OWC

If you have a recent Sony camera, you may be familiar with the difficulty of finding a CFexpress Type A card that doesn’t break the bank, especially if you’re looking for one of the faster 4.0-spec ones. While the situation has slowly been getting better, there are still not that many options for people who want CFexpress type A but don’t want to spend a ton.

One company trying to fix this is OWC. It’s added a 240GB card to its Atlas Pro lineup of CFexpress 4.0 type A cards, which comes in at $199. That’s obviously a chunk of change, but for context, the 480GB option costs $319, and upgrading to the 960GB card adds another $70 on top of that. And while there’s definitely a trade-off in capacity – expect to offload often if you’re shooting 60MP Raws or 4K video – the cheaper card still sports up to 1,850MBps read speeds and 1,700MBps write speeds. That means that even when you fill it up, it should only take a few minutes to dump it onto your computer, assuming you have a reader fast enough. But we’ll get to that in just a moment…

$199 at OWC

Got ports?

Image: OWC

Speaking of OWC, they’ve also got something for anyone who’s just picked up one of the new M4 Pro or M4 Max Macs with Thunderbolt 5 and is wishing for a few more ports. The company’s newly-announced Thunderbolt 5 Hub plugs into your computer with a single (included!) cable, and, through the power of Thunderbolt’s daisy-chaining abilities, gives you access to three additional Thunderbolt ports, each with 120Gbps of throughput. There’s even a USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps USB-A port.

The hub can also provide up to 140W of charging to the computer it’s connected to, which should be enough to keep even a top-spec MacBook Pro powered.

The Thunderbolt 5 Hub is available for pre-order for $189 at OWC’s website.

If you’re looking for a more traditional dock with a wider selection of ports, OWC isn’t selling one yet. However, Kensington does have a $399 option, which has three Thunderbolt 5 ports, three USB-A ports, 2.5GB ethernet, a UHS-II SD card and microSD card reader, and a headphone jack.

Not enough card readers?

Image: Lexar

Speaking of Thunderbolt add-ons, Lexar has come out with a new docking station designed to add storage, card readers, and ports to your setup. As its name implies, the Professional Workflow 6-Bay Docking Station has six slots that you can fill with your choice of the sold-separately card reader and storage modules.

There are several card reader modules available:

• Dual UHS-II SD
• UHS-II SD / microSD
• CFexpress 4.0 Type B
• CFexpress 4.0 Type A

The system is almost certainly overkill for most casual photographers, but it could be a good choice if you need to be able to offload several cards at a time, no matter what type. You will want to be a bit careful with how you arrange your modules, though: four slots run at 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2, while two feature full-fat Thunderbolt 4 connectors capable of 40Gbps. If you buy SSD modules or CF Express readers, you’ll want to put those in the faster ports.

In addition to the modular bays, the dock has two 10Gbps USB ports on the front – one type A and one type C – as well as two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back, though you’ll be using one to connect it to your computer. The other can be used to output to an up-to 8K display or to even daisy-chain to another dock or Thunderbolt device.

Image: Lexar

You probably wouldn’t want to haul the dock around unless you had a cart for it to sit on, but you can pop out the card reader or SSD modules and connect them to a laptop with a standard USB-C cable.

As you may have guessed, none of this comes cheap. The docking station itself, without any modules, costs $599. The SD card readers cost $50 each, the CF Express ones $100, and the SSDs are $299 for a 2TB model, and $499 for a 4TB one.

$599 at B&H

If that’s a bit rich for your blood, Sandisk’s $340 Pro Dock 4 may be worth considering. It only has four slots and is a few years old, so it uses Thunderbolt 3, though theoretically, that shouldn’t have a speed disadvantage compared to Thunderbolt 4.

A new Final Cut

Apple’s latest update to its video editing software is a big one, at least according to the version number*: the company says that Final Cut 11 “begins a new chapter” for editors. That may be a bit of a stretch. It’s largely the same software as before – there’s no entirely new paradigm the way there was with the switch from FCP 7 to X. However, there are some cool new features.

The first is ‘Magnetic Mask,’ which is essentially a semi-automated rotoscoping system. It lets you select an object to cut out and will then attempt to automatically mask it out for the rest of the clip – though you can make tweaks if the system gets it wrong. That way, you can have the cut-out portion appear in front of titles, or add effects to it that don’t affect the rest of the clip.

You can also now have Final Cut automatically transcribe your project’s audio and create closed captions for it. The software is also now capable of editing “spatial” video clips, like the ones produced by iPhones or cameras with Canon’s dual VR lenses. The update also includes various workflow improvements: you can now automatically scale clips to match the height of your timeline, hide clips in the browser, and easily create a picture-in-picture effect.

Thankfully, Apple hasn’t used the version number upgrade to switch up pricing, or to make users pay for it again. It’s still a $300 one-time purchase, and if you bought Final Cut Pro anytime between when it launched in 2011 and now, version 11 is just another free update. There was concern that wouldn’t be the case, after Apple announced the subscription-based Final Cut for iPad, which also just got its own update. At least for now, that hasn’t come to pass.

* – Real Mac-heads know this doesn’t neccesarily mean much; in 2020 Apple ditched the long-running macOS 10.x naming scheme with macOS 11 Big Sur. The fact that it was called macOS 11 and not 10.16 didn’t even get a mention in the press release.

ACDSee for Mac

Image: ACDSee

Earlier this year, ACDSee released a new version of its photo editing and management software, Photo Studio. It added features like AI-powered upscaling and new AI selection masks. However, the update was only for Windows. Now, those features are available for the Mac, too, with the release of ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 11.

In addition to the new and improved AI features, the software is now able to import a Lightroom database, letting you bring your collections, keywords, ratings and color labels into Photo Studio.

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac normally costs $99, but the company is selling it for $79 through November 27th. There’s also a free 15-day trial.

Click to read last week’s accessory roundup

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