ProGrade Rumored to Be Preparing CFexpress Type A Cards

Already a producer of CFexpress Type B cards, ProGrade will soon be selling CFexpress Type A cards as well. Prograde’s Type B cards have proven to be among the very best available, both in terms of speed and in price.

Currently the only manufacturer of CFexpress Type A cards in Sony, and the prices are exorbitant. The Sony cards come in about three times the price per gigabyte as many Type B cards, which are also much faster, so there is much room for ProGrade to provide a better value.

The CFexpress Type B card market exploded when the Canon R5 came out, requiring the card for its higher throughput video formats. There are now many vendors selling that version of the standard. The Type A card market blew up more recently, with the launch of Sony’s A7s Mark III, which cleverly uses the Type A cards in the same port as SD cards. Because Sony uses codecs requiring less bandwidth, the Type A cards work with all the video formats, despite having one half the speed of Type B cards.

Some cameras released a few years ago with the XQD standard, such as the Panasonic Lumix S1R have also been upgraded to the CFexpress Type B format via firmware, as the hardware form factor is identical. Those upgraded cameras, such as the Nikon Z7, have so far not proven to exploit the Type B format’s full speed.