Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Can a Pentax K-5 record more than 4 GB of video with an SDXC card?

Question

When using an SDHC card, the Pentax K-5 can only record up to 4 GB of video in a single clip. This is said to be because SDHC cards use the FAT32 file system, which has a 4 GB maximum file size. At the highest video size and quality settings, this permits only about 5 minutes of recording in a single clip.

There are suggestions in various forums that the use of an SDXC card (64 GB+) with the exFAT file system will allow recording larger files, up to the 25 minute hard cutoff imposed by the camera. However, those suggestions often seem to be based on logic ("it ought to work that way") rather than testing.

Does anyone know, through actual experience or reference to reliable sources, whether the K-5 can record more than 4 GB when an SDXC card is used?

Answer

No it cannot. It will only write a 4 GB file using the Motion-JPEG codec.

There are a number of cameras which use the AVCHD format and they can often record longer clips because the simply split the video stream into separate files. The K-5 is not one of them.

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