At the same time with the FX30 announcement Sony revealed two larger sizes CFexpress Type A TOUGH Memory Cards – 320GB and 640GB. The 640GB model will be the largest-capacity card of this type. Even though Sony has dramatically increased the sizes of these cards (from 80GB to 640GB), the speeds have remained the same. This series has rated of up to 800 MB/s read and 700 MB/s write speeds.

Have you been in a situation looking for your next SD card, comparing different brands and models, and trying to choose the best for your needs? Then you realize that on some of the SD cards you see the speed in MB/s, on others you see it with the “x-rating” (like 633x, 1000x, 2000x). Furthermore, some cards have shown the speed class number (usually nowadays it is C10), and some have a U1 or U3 sign. Some are marked with SDHC, and other SDXC I or SDXC II. And some cards have V30, V60 or V90 on them… So what do all these numbers mean?

CFexpress – the next generation memory cards for digital imaging

As technology progresses, we see that the memory cards are getting faster and with bigger capacity. For many years, CompacFlash was “the standard” of the imaging industry and was widely adopted by most companies desiring the highest capacity and performance available. SD cards, long perceived as non-professional media, fought their way to still be dominant on the market today. Nowadays very few cameras use cards different than SD. Nikon use XQD cards in their D5, D500 and D850, while Canon use CFast cards in their 1D X Mark II and dual CFexpress Type B in 1D X Mark III. Several older models use Compact Flash cards and this is it. All other cameras use some variation of SD cards – SD, SDHC, SDXC. Will a new standard (CFexpress) raise from the ashes of XQD ad CFast?