And people said CF Express type A cards would not get cheaper...

[AlphaWorld]

I was curious to see the local price of the Sony CF express type A v4 480GB card. Found a local dealer who has a price up. To my amusement, the local price is the same as the nominal RRP of the 160GB v2 card that was the first CF type A card Sony offered. I bought my first one of those in January 2021, in anticipation of the arrival of the A1. Back then people ranted about the price...

Now, in less that 5 years, you can get a CFeA card with 3x the capacity for nominally the same price (considering inflation, it's cheaper). That card isn't just 3x the size, though. It's also over 2x the speed (1800MB/s vs 800MB/s).

 

[Chris 3754]

I think these cards are still not “mainstream” like SD cards and still in the high end imaging niche. As such the price remains ridiculously high. I just did my first shoot yesterday with an a1ii using my SD cards (slot 1 RAW slot 2 JPEG) and had no buffer problems even with tracking a player at 30fps. That said, I don’t shoot video so maybe an issue there with high res stuff, but for my work I am going to stay with fast SD cards until I see some better prices. I guess sometime in the future SD cards will go the way of 8 Track tapes (you young folks may need to Google that and why a pack of matches was key to getting the tape to line up correctly in the tape deck).

 

[Sean2260]

Is there any reliability improvements for CF over SD? Outside of cameras I have never seen CF Express used. HP server I am picking up this week still has onboard microSD slot. My Raspberry Pi 5 still has SD slot, but I do have added NVME card. But no CF Express options anywhere I have seen. Osmo Action, GoPro, Insta360, and the rest all still use SD. Like Chris3754 said, they just are not mainstream and pricing reflects that....and it sucks.

At least the AngelBird CF v2 cards are good price. $130 for 160GB card. Sony's Tough brand 128GB SD card sells for $139.

 

[Chris 3754]

Great question on reliability, hopefully someone can jump in here on that subject. Although I have never had an SD card issue, I have heard that complaint. Of course I am heading to shoot another ice hockey game today and have probably jinxed myself.

Is there any reliability improvements for CF over SD? Outside of cameras I have never seen CF Express used. HP server I am picking up this week still has onboard microSD slot. My Raspberry Pi 5 still has SD slot, but I do have added NVME card. But no CF Express options anywhere I have seen. Osmo Action, GoPro, Insta360, and the rest all still use SD. Like Chris3754 said, they just are not mainstream and pricing reflects that....and it sucks.

At least the AngelBird CF v2 cards are good price. $130 for 160GB card. Sony's Tough brand 128GB SD card sells for $139.

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[Unframed Dave]

I have now had 3 cf card failures. The problem here is, what was at fault? The card, the reader, the laptop or the camera?

 

[THXGEEK]

I have now had 3 cf card failures. The problem here is, what was at fault? The card, the reader, the laptop or the camera?

Could be any/all of those.

One bad habit I used to have is to simply pull the card out of the reader on my PC. I've read that Win11 (sorry, don't know how this translates on a Mac) sometimes had delays in flushing the cache for the card - potentially leading to issues with the card when files are not properly closed. I now force myself to choose the 'eject' option from the taskbar and wait for the buffers to flush...

As always, YMMV.

 

[AlphaWorld]

Is there any reliability improvements for CF over SD? Outside of cameras I have never seen CF Express used. HP server I am picking up this week still has onboard microSD slot. My Raspberry Pi 5 still has SD slot, but I do have added NVME card. But no CF Express options anywhere I have seen. Osmo Action, GoPro, Insta360, and the rest all still use SD. Like Chris3754 said, they just are not mainstream and pricing reflects that....and it sucks.

At least the AngelBird CF v2 cards are good price. $130 for 160GB card. Sony's Tough brand 128GB SD card sells for $139.

I imagine they use SD cards because of ubiquity - can find them anywhere - rather than reliability.

CFexpress is significantly faster than SD, and is becoming steadily cheaper. It’s taking a while, because they aren’t yet cheap enough to become ubiquitous.

SDexpress looks like never taking off, so CFexpress has already won that battle. And I think it may have won the capacity battle - I don’t recall seeing SD cards over 512GB available readily. You can already get CFexpress type A cards near 2TB, and CFexpress type B cards larger still.

If you are happy using SD cards, be grateful to Sony for providing you with two SD-compatible slots in all their full-size cameras. If Sony had gone with CFexpress type B you would not have that option.

I am already glad I can load two CFexpress type A cards - only the huge cameras can offer two CFexpress type B slots (and that at the cost of having no SD slots).

 

[Uncle Kevriano]

I have also seen SD card failures, 2 Sandisk, 1 Lexar, and it's the card getting corrupted, but by what you can't tell, though I suspect the inner card chip is the issue. As yet I am not using CF Express, but the prices have dropped here too, Pergear 3500/3400 512gb cards are £130 now, not bad. I have seen write buffering on the A1 with my Sony Tough 277/150. It hasn't stopped me shooting. but it could.

 

[Unframed Dave]

I get zero buffering with cf Kev.

 

[Uncle Kevriano]

I get zero buffering with cf Kev.

You probabaly have the slightly faster cards.

 

[Chris 3754]

I have been thinking about taking the plunge and going CFExpress, and in looking at Angelbird on B&H, a reviewer said the card worked perfectly in their Sony camera but was not compatible with the Sony MRW-G2 card reader which I have. Seems odd that a card made to industry standard would not work in a reader made to industry standard. Anyone have any thoughts on this and can recommend CFs that work for them.

 

[Unframed Dave]

I use pergear cards, they work with their own readers, although they do get hot. I also have an unbranded reader and they work in that. Every now and again, there is a deal on amazon, where you buy a card and get a reader thrown in.