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Lexar has announced its newest Silver Series memory card offerings. The company’s Silver Series cards offer speeds that many photo and video professionals require without the higher price tags of the company’s Gold Series offerings.
The first of the new cards is the Lexar Professional CFexpress Type B Silver in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. The other is the Lexar Professional Silver Pro SDXC UHS-II SD card, available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities.
Lexar has today announced that they’re expanding their memory card range with the new SD Express format. The SD Express 8.0 specification was first announced last May, expanding the initial SD Express 7.0 standard of 2018, promising speeds up to 4GB/sec. Lexar’s cards aren’t going to be quite that fast, though.
According to a press release, Lexar says the new SD Express cards will offer write speeds of up to 410MB/sec and read speeds of up to 824MB/sec. This falls quite shy of 4GB/sec, and slower than most CFexpress cards the market today. Of course, the speeds only matter if hardware actually requires it. And right now, there are no devices that use SD Express.
Lexar has joined SanDisk, Sony, ProGrade, Delkin and Wise by releasing a CFexpress memory card reader. Surprisingly, it seems to be the cheapest on the market so far, coming in at a mere $50. It has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C socket, although the supplied cable is Type-C to Type-A (there’s no Type-C to Type-C cable in the box).
The reader boasts “Next-Generation Transfer speeds” with a read and write of up to 1,050Mb/sec. This may sound at odds with the Lexar’s own CFexpress cards boasting an impressive 1,750MB/sec read speed, but this is more a limitation of USB 3.1 Gen 2, which caps out at 1,250MB/sec.
A number of Nikon D780 users have posted online to various online platforms about memory card errors they’ve experienced since the camera’s release a couple of months ago. Nikon has issued a firmware update to correct “an issue that sometimes prevented use of certain SD memory cards”, although they haven’t gone really into any detail beyond that.
CFast 2.0 might be on the way out, thanks to CFexpress, but it’s a popular format still in use by a lot of cameras. The Pocket 4K and 6K, for example, pretty much require one for their highest resolution and highest data rate raw recording. But what happens if a card goes bad? Yes, it can happen. Well, that’s when you send it off to somebody to crack it open and have at it with a soldering iron.
Nikon announced their XQD cards back in August 2018, but they’re now finally in the USA, just in time to become obsoleted by the wave of CFexpress cards being released by everybody else. It only seems to be available in 64GB capacity, and not the 120GB previously reported, but they are showing as available right now to pre-order from B&H for $129.95.
The release comes just at a time when SanDisk, Delkin, ProGrade, Wise and Lexar have just released their CFexpress cards for order (in the case of SanDisk) or pre-order (everybody else), offering 3-4x the speeds of Nikon’s (or anybody else’s) XQD cards.
Although there have been some announcements of 1TB memory cards, Lexar seems to have beat them all. The company has released the world’s first 1TB SDXC memory card and it’s officially the first one actually available in the market.
Although this won’t be of much to iOS users, Lexar has announced a new 512GB 633x (100MB/sec) A2 microSD card for smartphones. Designed for lots of fast read and write operations per second, this card is ideal for Android smartphones. Especially those used by photographers and filmmakers shooting lots of photos and footage.
Since Lexar’s move from Micron to Longsys, their future has been in doubt. But it looks like they’re finally back and ready to get serious.
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.
Since Micron sold memory card brand, Lexar to Longsys in China, people have been wondering what’s going on. Will they still keep making those favourite Lexar products? Will they bring out a new range? Or will they just take Lexar’s intellectual property, apply it to other products and not make memory cards at all?
Well, now it seems that we have our answer. Longsys has put out a statement saying that Lexar will be back in “full production” and shipping globally by the autumn.
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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