Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
It’s been three long years since SanDisk first showed off a 1TB SD card at Photokina. It was operational, but it was essentially just a proof of concept to show that it could be done. Now, SanDisk feels the market is ready to adopt such huge cards, and that the prices today will be more manageable than they were in 2016.
We caught up with SanDisk at IBC 2019 where they were also showing off the 1TB microSD Cards, their new CFexpress cards, as well as a new fast USB SSD.
You know, I was just thinking the other day when SanDisk announced their new cards that Angelbird’s been awfully quiet on the CFexpress front. They’ve become a very popular brand over the last couple of years when it comes to high-performance CFast, SSD and other storage formats. So their silence with regard to CFexpress cards, when everybody else seems to have announced some, was surprising.
Now, though, Angelbird has officially announced that they’re entering the CFexpress market with two new cards, the AV PRO CFX for cinema users, and AVPRO CFX XT for tough heavy-duty industrial needs. Naturally, they’re bringing out their own CFexpress card reader to go along with them.
CFexpress is the drop-in next-generation replacement for XQD. It’s also a sort-of replacement for CFast. It doesn’t fit into a CFast slot, but it’s what manufacturers are dumping in favour of CFexpress in their new generations of kit – like Canon’s recently announced EOS C500 Mark II. So far, we’ve seen a few companies throw their names into the hat, but one notable player has remained pretty silent. Until now.
SanDisk has announced their new SanDisk Extreme Pro CFexpress 2.0 Type B card, which is already available for sale in European markets. It’s popped up in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities in the UK and other places, and writes up to 1.4GB/sec and reads at up to 1.7GB/sec.
At least, it’ll shoot full frame 12-Bit RAW video when the new firmware comes out in a few weeks. The Z6 (and Z7, and a few of Nikon’s DSLRs) will also support CFexpress when the new firmware update comes, too. Not surprisingly, Nikon was showing off the new Z6 Filmmaker’s Kit at NAB 2019, so we stopped by the booth to have a chat and find out more about it.
Hot on the heels of ProGrade Digital’s CFexpress announcement, Sony, too has announced that new CFexpress cards are coming. While Sony’s cards don’t come in the same high 1TB capacity as the ProGrade cards, they are even faster, offering up to 1700MB/sec read and 1480MB/sec write speeds. They’re also built to be rugged, falling under Sony’s “Tough” line of memory cards.
ProGrade Digital has officially announced the launch of their new CFexpress cards. But the range has expanded since they teased us with the 1TB CFexpress card last year at NAB. It’s also gotten a bit of a speed boost, too! Along with a new CFexpress card reader, two lines of CFexpress cards are coming in Gold and Cobalt flavours offering read speeds of up to 1.6GB/sec and write speeds up to 1.4GB/sec.
After Lexar’s Polish distributor announced that Lexar will no longer produce XQD cards in order to focus on CFexpress, Lexar has issued a further statement to Nikon Rumors. In the statement, they say that availability of XQD has been “held up by multiple parties”, specifically naming Sony.
This is probably not much of a surprise to some, but it will be very disappointing to others. Especially those who might have recently bought or pre-ordered a camera with an XQD card slot. It seems that Lexar is now not going to be making XQD cards since it moved from Micron to Longsys, after all.
The news comes as Polish distributor, My Adventure, issued a statement. The (Google) translated release reads “XQD cards with the Lexar logo will not appear on the market”. They say that Lexar’s focus is now on the XQD & CFast successor, CFexpress.
Just as we start to accept UHS-II into our lives, and before UHS-III is even a real thing, a new standard hits the streets. That’s right, folks, SD Express has now been announced, offering data transfer speeds of up to 985MB/sec. It also bumps up the maximum capacity from SDCX’s 2TB to the new SDUC’s 128TB.
SD Express uses PCIe and NVMe interfaces to deliver these faster transfer speeds. To read about how the SD Association talks about SD Express, it’s almost like they want or expect people to start using these as portable SSD replacements for general use.
It seems that ProGrade Digital really isn’t messing around here. Early last month, they said they were going to skip XQD in favour of its next-generation replacement, CFexpress. Today, ProGrade Digital announces a new 1TB CFexpress card capable of transfer speeds up to a whopping 1.4GB/sec. Also announced today are three new 64GB, 128GB and 256GB UHS-II SDXC cards aimed at video shooters with write speeds up to 200MB/sec.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
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