Sony's 32GB Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo HX proves that product naming is hard
By Thomas Ricker 
posted July 13th 2009 4:28AM
posted July 13th 2009 4:28AM
What's not to love here? Just look at that handsome blister pack, ready to mince flesh in your enthusiasm to get at Sony's largest and most convolutedly named Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX. The 32GB stick is rated at 20MBps reads or 15MBps writes when using the bundled USB adapter. Imagine, had you purchased pretty much any device other than that Cyber-shot, Handycam, or Alpha shooter from Sony you could have been enjoying 30MBps read/writes from 32GB SDHC class 10 cards. Nope, no availability date or pricing announced, how could that information possibly be useful in a press release?
That's a cool idea. I've got a Sony Reader; it might be useful to use both slots, but I don't want to buy a Memory Stick.
I sold my SONY camera for this reason and bought a canon. i won't support anymore of these silly formats by companies.
If you had examined the image you uploaded for this article, you would have noticed that the name is clearly "Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo." Although that is a relatively long name, please don't be a jackass and misrepresent the product. Perhaps you should consider that "HX" may be a tag for "High Speed" or "High Speed Data Transfer" rather than a part of the product name.
Next time, go all out by calling it "Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo High Speed Data Transfer HX read 20 MB/s For use with CX, Handycam and 'Cyber-shot' products" because you clearly don't have any regard to reporting the actual product name.
Um Chris, read the press release. Sony calls it the "Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX" exactly 5 times.
Thomas
Oh snap!
(This is the third time I've tried replying... so this will be significantly shorter than originally intended.)
That's both humbling and frustrating.
Humbling: my bad; this is a lesson to read source material before commenting.
Frustrating: Sony needs to establish and maintain product identity.
No price or date? As if the announcement already had enough juicy details. Thanks for trying to make this interesting, engadget.
As for the snarky Alpha comment, there is no Alpha that uses ONLY Memory Stick. My A100, A700 and A900 all work great with the Lexar UDMA CF cards, and the new 230, 330 and 380 take Memory Stick AND SD cards.
And sony apologized and said recently they should have listened to the customers more and will do so more in the future as you might recall, so to enable them the customers here are voicing their views on the sony memory cards, voilà.
My first 5 digital cameras were Sony's. The Memory Stick nonsense drove me to Canon and I have not looked back since. It is very nice to be able to move cards from camera to laptop, to phone, to netbook etc.
I once found SD cards for sale in a small grocery store in the middle of the Pyrenees Mountains in France. You would be lucky to find your particular flavor of Memory Stick in a fully stocked Best Buy in Silicon Valley.
I would be willing to bet that Saony loses more money on equipment sales from people avoiding the Memory Stick than they make selling Memory Sticks.
Who has a Sony memory stick? Mine are all Lexar or Sandisk.
I understand the naming is weird on this. The naming on SDHC Class 10 isn't? Or better yes SDHC micro class 10. And you can crap on Memory Stick all you want, but it didn't undergo an incompatible change in the last year like SD did with SD->SDHC (and the upcoming compatible but confusing SDXC!).
SD cards suck, why would I want to use some tiny, fragile DRM (hence the word "Secure")-protected card?
All memory sticks over 128MB are actually Memory Stick Pro (including this one) and thus have MagicGate, which is a similar DRM system to SD's system. Neither DRM scheme is employed in any device that I know of.
It's a wonder why the DRM has never been used. For modern consoles it would make a lot of sense. Ever since we starting using discs there has been an optional mechanism in most consoles to prevent you from making copies of a game save. Developers have been exploiting this more and more to prevent cheating in online play. The problem is this system is still there, but since saves a made internally there is no way to carry them over to another system if they've been locked like this. It would be nice if they used the DRM in such a way as to allow transfers while preventing an infinite number of copies from being made.
i wanna those that i can put all psp games in it but i will w8 till pspgo will come to my country