Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
CFexpress is coming. Of that, there is no doubt. It’s the drop-in replacement for XQD and will also replace many of the CFast 2.0 slots on the next generation of cameras. ProGrade Digital was the first to announce support for the new format, back in April last year, but they’ve been holding off on releasing it until hardware comes out that actually supports it.
See the update at the bottom of this article containing a response from ProGrade Digital.
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.
ProGrade Digital is rounding out their card reader lineup quite nicely to appeal to as many different types of user as possible. They’re now up to four card readers, covering CFast+UHS-II SD, CompactFlash+UHS-II SD, dual UHS-II microSD cards and now dual UHS-II SD cards. The new card reader is priced at $79.99, same as the other three, and is available now.
Photography and video seem to come with a never-ending need for extras and accessories. And after we’ve bought our cameras, lenses, lights and bags to put it all in, we still find ourselves needing extra things here and there. So, in this gift guide, we’re going to take a look at some of DIYP’s favourite and most used accessories.
ProGrade Digital certainly seems to have settled into the swing of things nicely since their launch earlier in the year. Initially starting up with a range of CFast 2.0 UHS-II V60 SD cards, and a dual format card reader, they quickly expanded out into UHS-II V90 SD and the next major high-end format; CFexpress.
Now, they’re going small, announcing three new V60 UHS-II microSD cards. With users demanding higher quality footage from their drones, action cameras & 360 cameras, it’s a logical path to pursue. They’ve also announced two new USB 3.1 Gen 2 card readers, too. One contains SD and CompactFlash slots while the other takes a pair of microSD cards.
For a long while now, we’ve been using the Sony a6300 as a second camera/frugal 4k camera. The quality is superb and really, we could not be happier. Well, that’s a lie, we could be happier if the darn thing did not overheat after 15 minutes of use. OK, skipping to another story: Over the last few weeks, we’ve moved from our old fleet of Sandisk Extreme Pro cards to Prograde V60 cards.
We noticed that after the move to the UHS-II cards, the a6300 is no longer overheating. At least in out controlled studio environment. For testing, we turned the AC off (as you can probably tell) and plugged the a6300 into a Tethered Tools case relay to get uninterrupted power. The SanDisk Extreme pro lasted about 15 minutes, while the Prograde lasted the entire 30 minutes.
Now, here is the interesting thing, the Prograde V60 are USH-II cards. (you’ll see that the cards have more contacts). Once we moved to those cards, the camera stopped overheating and we can reach the “imposed” 30 minutes recording that the camera provides, effectively doubling the recording time we get from it.
When Longsys acquired Lexar from Micron last September, it threw the storage card world into disarray. What was happening to all of Lexar’s products? Were we still going to get support? And what about XQD? Well, it seems when it comes to the last one, Lexar might not have been telling us the whole truth since it went under new management.
B&H switched the status of Lexar XQD cards over to “discontinued” in October. Lexar publicly announced via Twitter back then that they will continue to produce XQD cards and fulfill the B&H inventory “in a few weeks”. Well, it’s now 6 months later, they’re still listed as discontinued. Now, according to Nikon Rumors, Lexar is telling us to wait until the summer. But they may not be back even that soon.
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.
I was hoping that new memory card company ProGrade Digital would give photographers some good news about XQD at some point. And this simultaneously isn’t good news, but it also sort of is. ProGrade Digital have confirmed that they are not going to be pursuing the XQD memory format, which isn’t going to make some Nikon shooters happy. They are, however, working toward XQD’s successor, CFexpress.
CFexpress is backwards compatible with XQD – if the device manufacturer allows it – but with much faster transfer rates. This means that while there won’t officially be a ProGrade Digital XQD card, there should be XQD compatible storage coming at some point. That is, assuming Nikon updates the firmware in the D500, D850, D4, D4s, D5 and any other XQD bodies they may produce.
When Micron announced they were quitting the Lexar brand last year, it came as quite a shock. Many long-time Lexar fans were worried about where their future memory cards would be coming from. A short time later, the Lexar brand was acquired by Longsys, a Chinese manufacturer of flash storage. Very little seems to have happened in Lexar’s story since then, though, except for the continued production of Lexar XQD cards.
Now, though, it seems a new company, sort of, is entering the fray. ProGrade Digital is a new brand of professional grade memory cards and card readers aimed at photographers. But while this is a new company, they aren’t newcomers to the memory card game. It’s being headed up by a team of former Lexar and SanDisk executives and senior management.
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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