Another CFexpress Type A Offering in Offing

Exascend, a Taiwanese chip company that makes CFexpress Type B cards, among many other flash devices, will release a CFexpress Type A card soon. The company joines Delkin, ProGrade and, of course, Sony, in providing memory cards for the format. In a first, Excascend will offer a 240GB card, 50 percent larger in capacity than the largest offered by other brands.

CFexpress Type A cards have been praised for their small form factor – and, particularly, for Sony’s clever use of them, where they’ve created memory card ports that can take both the Type A cards and SD cards.

However, there have been few manufacturers providing the cards, and even the budget-minded brands who have been providing them have been charging prices that are more than twice the cost per gigabyte on average as CFexpress Type B cards, which are also twice as fast as the Type A cards.

The chart at left shows the average movement of prices over the last 18 months for the different types of cards [More charts and data on CFexpress formats here]. While CFexpress Type B cards have gone down in price by about a quarter, Type A cards have gone down about 10 percent. The Type B cards are rapidly approaching the cost per gigabyte of SD cards, while Type A cards remain about 2.5 times more expensive.

The introduction of Exascend is a good sign that the Type A market isn’t being abandoned, but their suggested pricing for the new cards appears to be close to the other offerings. None of the three non-Sony brands appear to be attempting to compete on price, though Exascend’s pricing is a little lower. They will charge $190 for a 120GB card; $300 for a 180 GB card and $400 for a 240GB card.