Here Comes Lexar’s Expensive New 320GB CFE A Gold Card
News | By Stephan Jukic | November 9, 2022
Dominant digital storage manufacturer Lexar has introduced a new and higher-capacity CFexpress Type A card for digital cameras onto the market.
The new card model is in the brand’s Gold line and offers 320GB of internal space and rapid-fire transfer speeds of up to 900MB/s for reading and 800MB/s for writing.
This new card follows previous releases by Lexar that offered much more modest storage capacities of 80 and 160GB respectively and were launched in August of this year.
With this edition, Lexar has launched a product with very similar read and write capacities but with the obvious and much larger storage space.
This however is typical of recent CFexpress launches in which different cards of a single type can have drastically different storage capacities but still offer the same essential read and write speeds unless otherwise specified.
Lexar’s new card is a major upgrade from the brand’s previous most-powerful option with its doubling of storage capacity to 320GB. It can at least let photographers keep shooting large-resolution photos even in RAW format without having to fiddle around with a card change too soon.
It’s also worth noting that this Lexar model has been rated with Video Performance Guarantee 400 (VPG 400) certification, which requires that a card never performs at a write speed of less than 400MB/s.
With the above in mind, the new Lexar card is just one of a spate of offerings of CFexpress cards by different manufacturers for high-performance photo and video recording:
Earlier this year, Sony even released a new and much larger-than-average 640GB CFexpress Type A card of its own for a very hefty price tag of $1,249 per pop.
Later, Pergear launched its own Type B CFE cards at much lower prices and much higher storage capacities, as well as superior read/write speeds to those of the Lexar models above. The top performers among the Pergear models however curiously lack the VPG 400 certification of the Lexar edition.
Lexar itself claims that the new card will never go below a write speed of 700MB/s and claims that this should make it good enough for serious video recording without a single dropped frame. It should be even more functional for photographer needs.
To give Lexar its due credit on this claim, testing by PetaPixel has shown that their cards tend to outperform those of their rivals from Sony and ProGrade Digital on certain metrics.
This performance doesn’t come cheap, however. Lexar is offering the new Professional CFexpress Type A Card GOLD Series 320GB card for $700. To make this dip into the wallet hurt just a bit less, the card does come bundled with Lexar’s CFexpress Type A/SD Card Reader as part of the same price.
The brand’s 80GB card retails for $200 and the 160GB edition is selling for $400 if you’re thinking that $700 is a bit much. Again, both of these lower-capacity cards offer roughly the same high-end read/write speeds as the 320GB version.
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Stephan Jukic is a technology and photography journalist and experimental photographer who spends his time living in both Canada and Mexico. He loves cross-cultural street photo exploration and creating fine art photo compositions.
