Find handholding a Sony PMW-EX1 a bit tricky? Want to nail tricky focus pulls every time? Ever had the creeping horror of finding an otherwise shot’s slightly soft when you’re back in the edit suite?

Get a ‘sock loupe and Hood Pro’!

Luminaries such as Philip Bloom and Adam Wilt have reviewed them and described them so I will simply point you in their general direction by way of the Hood Pro site. But one thing I will add is that the Hood Pro has had an unexpected benefit in hand-holding an EX1 by providing a sort of three-point contact.

Only a little pressure is required to add a disproportionate increase in stability over long periods. And if you can just about make out the image below, it’s fine for those of us who wear glasses too. It’s not a permanent addition to my EX1, but for hand-held and run-and-gun shooting, it’s become a ‘must have’ accessory. Get ready to kick yourself for not buying when it was cheaper – but that’s the global economy for you.

Just one note of caution, though – Hood Pro does make an all-black version, and in retrospect I’d have chosen that one instead of the fluorescent orange and blue version I have. It’s cheerful and fun, but not exactly discrete.

Before I explain that rather astonishing headline, it’s worth just pausing for a moment and considering the power of the internet and the power of the consumer USING the internet.

I’m a KxS shooter, which – in English – means I own a Sony PMW-EX1 but instead of very expensive SxS media cards, I’ve adopted SDHC cards in a Kensington adaptor. But the cost is that I can’t close the SxS ‘door’ on my EX1.

But I am not alone. In fact, there’s a lot of EX1 owners out there. Enough to cruise the web and wipe out stocks of Kensington adpators around the world. I kid you not. There have been shortages of this benign accessory, and murmours have turned into conspiracy theories about why Kensington haven’t replenished stocks following talks with Sony.

Okay, so Videography is a fairly small world. Sony users are a subgroup of that, and EX1 users are a very small subgroup of the Sony User clan. Those EX1 users who’ve heard of KxS surely must be a very small subset. Yet this group have wiped out stocks in the US, Europe and Australasia. Hmmm.

There was talk of a global conspiracy – Sony talking to Kensington, asking them in a Cosy Nostra sort of way to make KxS disappear. The lack of Kensington 7-1 adaptors grew to a global phenomenon. But then supplies begin to trickle back. KxS makes the EX1 viable in so many situations where once it was not.

And then comes Ross Herewini of e-films.com.au, a passionate and driven EX1 user who spots an opportunity and goes for it: behold – an SDHC adaptor specially designed for EX1 owners that allows cards that meet the grade to be used in an EX1 with the door closed. Built for the job, each one tested before dispatch. He’s dubbed it MxR.

I’ve ordered four, and when I buy my EX3 I will buy more – one for each SD card I own, as I’ve since found that swapping SD cards in adaptors is rather more hassle than the $35 it costs to buy individual adaptors per card.

So the internet has brought together an interesting group of people that have created a new product that will sell very well around the world due to a strange yet brilliant workaround also popularised by the internet.

KxS is dead. Long live MxR