ProGrade Working on Firmware Update Feature

DC Watch published a long interview with ProGrade Japanese representative Kazuhiko Oki, revealing coming plans to introduce firmware upgrade capabilities this spring. ProGrade makes some of the best CFexpress Type B cards available on the market. They test among the very fastest in Camnostic’s comprehensive review of cards, but they’re not cheap.

Some existing cards, and future manufactured cards will be able to have their firmware upgraded via software made for both Mac and PC. Oki couldn’t indicate which existing cards would not be able to be upgraded.

He did speak about the differences between ProGrade’s Cobalt line of cards versus their Gold line of cards, mentioning the fact that the Cobalt cards use three times the individual cells to contain the same data, rather than stacking three bits into one cell. This makes their capacity lower for the same amount of hardware, explaining in part the high cost of the Cobalt cards.

The Gold cards, priced more like most other cards on the market, are also quite a lot slower than both the Cobalt cards and those of many popular, cheaper brands.

When asked, Oki indicated that ProGrade does not provide a service replacing older firmware cards with newer cards.

Austrian manufacturer Angelbird was the first to provides a firmware replacement process that could be accomplished at home. Prior to this, in the early days, when the CFexpress Type B format was quite new, both Angelbird and Delkin replaced older firmware cards with cards with new firmware for free if the user experienced an incompatibility that an upgrade could fix.