New Delkin Cards Tie for Value in CFexpress Race, Rank Third in Speed

First there was Delkin, one of the first developers of CFexpress Type B cards – the new camera memory card format made necessary by the combination of ludicrous frame rates and resolutions. When we first started collecting data back in 2020, Delkin was plainly the leader in super-large cards giving buyers a good price per gigabyte. Then Angelbird beat them a little bit on speed and matched them on price. Then Wise came and made headway on both. Sabrent and Acer, too. Now, Delkin takes back the lead with a 10.4 percent faster Power G4 card. The 1 TB version they sent us to test costs $400 retail, giving it a $0.40 per gigabyte cost. The 2 TB model – our favorite size – puts in a 35-cent per gigabyte cost, at $580 retail, beating even the Angelbird, and the previous Delkin Power version that was actually more expensive.

Where the older model would stack on 287 frames in 30 seconds on an R5 camera shooting at 20 frames. The

per second, the new G4 version and devour 319, a speed figure beaten by only two other cards. See the chart at left, where the two new largest G4 cards are shown as yellow bars. The figures are generated as averages from dozens of tests in multiple cameras with standardized settings, subjects and lighting. Unfortunately, the spec sheet performances are never realized. Many factors siphon away performance, not least various firmware interactions between cards and cameras. The R5s used were rocking the newest firmware (1.8.1) and the oldy-but-goodie, version 1.7. There were not noticeable differences between them for the Delkin card.

This rejiggers our charts a bit. The new Delkin Power G4 models replace the slower Power models, and simultaneously pull down the price per gigabyte among the largest card size. A re-pricing of all of the cards was completed on June 7 to provide up-to-date relative pricing. This revealed the quite strong trend seen at right, where the CFexpress average pricing across the entire market has been plummeting since the format’s launch. As can be seen below, the CFexpress Type A cards – those used

by some Sony, Nikon and other cameras, continues to suffer from low capacities and – pictured in the chart at left – persistently very high prices. CFexpress Type B, on the other hand, has dropped (shown in blue) so much as to be cheaper on average than SD UHS-II cards, shown as the gray line.

The cards come in the standard sizes in powers of two, ranging from 128 gigabytes through 2 terabytes, but additionally 165 GB, 325 GB, 650 GB and 1.3 TB, the latter one being a size new to the consumer market.

Delkin launched its new Power G4 series with a promotion distributing some number of 1 TB card copies among retailers selling for just $100. By the time the press packet arrived all the way over here on the East Coast, a couple days after the launch date, it appears the inventory had already been bought out.