Sony 160GB TOUGH CFexpress Type A Flash Memory Card - VPG400 High Speed G Series with Video Performance Guarantee (Read 800MB/s and Write 700MB/s) – CEA-G160T

Product Information

The successor to CompactFlash, now based on the Serial ATA (SATA) interface, first hit the market in 2009, though it would take several years for the imaging industry to fully adopt the format. No; the majority of cameras use SD or microSD cards for storage. However, with CFexpress rising in popularity, many newer, high-end mirrorless and DSLR cameras are capable of utilizing the improved storage format. These include Sony's A7 III and Alpha 1, Nikon's Z6 and Z7 series, Canon's EOS R5, Panasonic's Lumix S1, and some similar options. What's the difference between CFexpress types A and B?

Even if a card doesn’t even come close to the promised peak read or write speeds seen on the side of the box (which none of them did, by the way), it doesn’t matter. For video, Acer, which promised the least when it comes to read and write speeds, performed identically to Angelbird which promised the most. The only obvious downside to the Zitay CFexpress Type A to SSD Adapter is that you will need to have the media card door open on your camera. You also then need to mount the NVMe enclosure to your camera. Beyond the speed improvements, the CFA highlights power efficiency as another key aspect of the new standard. Despite the increased performance of this new storage format, CFexpress 4.0 is designed to maintain certain power consumption targets to help improve the adoption of CFexpress 4.0, especially among battery-powered cameras and other devices. The new standard allows for 2500 mA power draw from the smallest Type A cards, 3000 mA from Type B, and 3500 mA from large Type C cards.

FAQ

Why it made the cut: Lexar’s newest card provides the fastest burst shooting results of any CFexpress. Type A cards measure 20 x 28 x 2.8mm and are typically used by Sony cameras, including the Sony A7S III and the Sony A7 IV. CFexpress Type A cards are actually smaller than SD cards, making them useful for cameras that support both memory card types that have a limited number of slots. Big deal, you might be thinking. Why should I be excited about a memory card? Especially when you might have noticed that a CFexpress card seems to cost a bit more than a regular SD memory card. Even more intensive video capture modes are the obvious use, but do we really need 4GB/s? The efficiency of the HEVC encoding format means you won’t need anything like that data rate even at 8K 120fps.

Sony is the only camera maker that is currently utilizing Type A cards. They are smaller than Type B, so they are not cross-compatible. Storage capacity Why it made the cut: If storage capacity is the most important thing to you, Angelbird’s 4TB card provides more room than any other CFexpress card.CFexpress Type B cards, meanwhile, have the same dimensions as XQD cards at 38.5 x 29.6 x 3.8mm. These cards are used by the vast majority of camera manufacturers, including names like Nikon, Canon and Panasonic. Type B cards offer faster transfer speeds than Type A cards due to the greater number of PCIe data transfer lanes. This allows them to reach transfer speeds of up to 2GB/s where Type A cards are limited to 1GB/s We’re highly likely to see this announced at some point, because arch CFexpress-rival the SD Association has already announced PCIe 4.0 integration for a future version of SD Express cards; however, don’t expect to see these cards on sale for a couple of years at least. video will require more space than shooting a handful of JPEG files, for example. And, the file sizes from an APS-C camera will be much smaller than the Sony a1, meaning you won’t need as much storage space. And lastly, some like to use multiple small cards and swap them out more frequently as protection should a card fail, while others like a single card with loads of storage to keep from needing to change them out. This is a matter of personal preference and shooting style, so simply choose what makes the most sense for you. Read & write speed

Finally, there’s CFexpress Type C. These cards have the most transfer lanes, allowing them to reach transfer speeds of up to 4GB/s. However, they measure 54 x 74 x 4.8mm making them much too large for cameras. Type C cards are typically featured alongside computers and SSDs instead. IS CFexpress better than SD? PopPhoto has a long history of delivering the opinions of some of the sharpest and most prolific camera dorks the world has to offer. Since 1937, we’ve been reviewing cameras, providing wisdom from well-known photographers, and generally just nerding out about all that goes into making great pictures. Our current crop of writers and editors have decades of professional photography and camera writing experience among them. Collectively, we’ve probably shot with just about every camera and lens combo you can imagine—as well as some obscure stuff you may not even know about. Remember the Casio Tryx folding camera? PopPhoto does. Beyond speed, Sony designed its cards to be, as the name says, tough. They can withstand falls up to 15 feet and have been rigidity tested to 70 newtons of force. Sony says they are three times stronger than the CFexpress standard for bending. They can also withstand extreme temperatures, X-rays, electrostatic, and intense UV light. Even if you are an expedition photographer, these cards will hold up to some serious abuse.Whether you're using type A or B, higher-capacity CFexpress cards appear to perform better. Since these cards are already expensive, we'd recommend investing a little extra for something around 300-500 GB to start for better performance. Yes and no, as the manufacturer of the SoC (camera main chip - Canon, Sony or Socionext) can just replace the existing PCIe interface with a faster one (probably just buying in a design). The problem is speeding the chip up to have other things work fast enough, which will probably need a geometry shrink, which can get very expensive and may not be practical at the camera market size - probably less than 1M units for the high end ones that might have this, split over three manufacturers. What’s the takeaway here? Prices vary between countries quite significantly at higher capacities, and ProGrade’s Cobalt series CFexpress cards appear to offer the best continuous write performance available in 2020. What’s next for CFexpress?

For most photographers, we just recommend V60 cards — they’re a great balance between speed and affordability. If you shoot 4K (or higher) video, you may want to invest in V90 cards, depending on your camera. Basic 8-bit footage will write easily to V60 (or often even to V30) cards, and most 10-bit 4K will be fine with V60 cards, but higher-quality footage like ProRes RAW or regular RAW may need at least V90.

CFexpress cards use an interface called PCIe 3.0, as well as NVMe 1.3 protocols. You don’t really need to know the ins and outs of how this stuff works – the bottom line is that this is the kind of tech you would previously have found in computers and solid-state drives (SSDs), which are typically much faster than SD cards. considering that the proven buffer cache is much cheaper to increase it in size than implementation of the new PCIe interface." ProGrade Gold cards claim 400MB/s sustained write speeds, and its Cobalt range offers incredible sustained writes of 1400MB/s or 1500MB/s – it varies between storage levels – and you won’t find better in a Type B card, as of mid-2020.