Lexar's New $1,000 CFexpress 4.0 Type B Diamond Card Is Its Fastest Yet | PetaPixel

After showing off the 1TB CFexpress 4.0 Type B Diamond series memory card at NAB 2024 in April and IFA 2024 in Germany last month, the blazing-fast new memory card is finally available to order for $999.99.

The $1,000 outlay gets photographers and videographers up to 3,700 MB/s read and 3,400 MB/s write speeds, provided the user has a CFexpress 4.0 device to take full advantage of the card’s performance. While CFexpress 4.0-equipped cards are much faster for transferring to a computer using a compatible card reader, no camera yet takes advantage of CFexpress 4.0 technology.

Compared to other CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards to hit the market, like the Wise and Nextorage cards announced in February, Lexar’s new card slots in the middle in terms of speed. Wise’s card offers 3,400 and 2,600 MB/s peak read and write speeds, while the Nextorage CFexpress 4.0 memory cards peak at 3,900 and 3,600 MB/s, respectively.

Last year, ProGrade announced a new 1.3TB variant of its CFexpress Type B Cobalt series that can hit 3,400 MB/s read speeds and deliver sustained write speeds of 2,800 MB/s. Shortly after that, OWC debuted new CFexpress 4.0 Atlas cards that offer 3,650 MB/s and 3,000 MB/s speeds.

What’s notable about Lexar’s new Diamond card is that it only comes in a 1TB capacity, while competitors have a bit more variety in their offerings. Wise has a 4TB card, for example, while ProGrade goes all the way down to 256GB for one of its CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards, although it is slower than some of the company’s higher-capacity cards.

The new Lexar card is also one of the priciest per gigabyte of all the CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards on the market. Priced at $1,000, that is, thanks to some very easy math, a buck a gigabyte. OWC’s 1TB Atlas Ultra card, although its max write speed tops out at just 3,000 MB/s, is $349.99, or $0.35 per gigabyte. ProGrade’s most performant card, the 1.6TB Iridium type B, is $949.99, or just under 60 cents per gigabyte.

“Experience the CFexpress 4.0 advantage and capture stunning, seamless, cinema-quality 8K RAW video with write speeds up to 3,400MB/s and dramatically expedite post-production with read speeds up to 3,700MB/s,” Lexar explains. “Equipped with eight-point protection against temperature, vibration, wear-out, dust (IP5X), drops, shocks, compression, and bends, the card also comes with data recovery software and a limited lifetime warranty.”

Photographers and videographers certainly don’t lack super-fast CFexpress Type B cards these days. Hopefully, cameras that can take full advantage of them will arrive soon.

Image credits: Lexar