Sony 160GB TOUGH CFexpress Type A Flash Memory Card - VPG400 High Speed G Series with Video Performance Guarantee (Read 800MB/s and Write 700MB/s) – CEA-G160T

Product Information

Why it made the cut: This SanDisk 64GB CFexpress Type B card is the most affordable option that is still high-quality and trustworthy. This used to be more important when memory cards were generally much slower, but these days while you’ll still come across it on some modern cards, it’s largely unhelpful. Speed Class has been effectively replaced by either UHS Speed Class or Video Speed Class, and either is going to be better to determine the capability of a card. UHS Speed Class

Where this card does beat out all the competition is in burst performance. It can shoot at the Canon R5’s highest burst setting for just over 30 seconds before the buffer limit slows it down, which is nearly double any other card. So if you are photographing sports or fast-moving wildlife, this will be the card to use because of its burst capabilities.

PopPhoto has a long history of delivering the opinions of some of the sharpest and most prolific camera dorks the world has to offer. Since 1937, we’ve been reviewing cameras, providing wisdom from well-known photographers, and generally just nerding out about all that goes into making great pictures. Our current crop of writers and editors have decades of professional photography and camera writing experience among them. Collectively, we’ve probably shot with just about every camera and lens combo you can imagine—as well as some obscure stuff you may not even know about. Remember the Casio Tryx folding camera? PopPhoto does. Many CFexpress cards top out at 512GB of storage, with a few offering 2TB. Angelbird brought something new to the table with its massive 4TB card. It offers more storage space than anything else available at the time of writing. The large storage makes it a great choice for high-end video work that produces large files. And it goes beyond just storage size to support lofty projects with heavy data needs. Angelbird promises minimum sustained read and write speeds of 1,785 MB/s and 1,300 MB/s, respectively. It also says it’s capable of 17,850 MB/s and 1,550 MB/s of maximum read and write speeds.

When it comes to Type A cards, Sony was the only game in town, announcing a range of CFexpress Type A cards alongside the A7S III. Since then Delkin and Lexar have started to produce cards in the CFexpress type A format. Offering read/write speeds of around 800MB/s and 700MB/s, the Sony CFexpress Type A TOUGH Memory Cards are, as the name implies, tough enough to stand up to the rigours of professional use. They come in 80GB and 160GB varieties. SanDisk’s card is compatible with raw 4K video, making it suitable for videographers and vloggers. Should something unfortunate happen, SanDisk offers a limited lifetime warranty. You’ll also have access to free RescuePRO Deluxe data recovery software in case you need to recover files that you accidentally delete. CFexpress cards are the latest generation of what was once CompactFlash (CF card). These are high speed memory cards designed to keep up with the demands of the latest cameras in terms of both high-resolution photos and video. The Sony Alpha A7S III (above) is the first camera to support CFexpress Type A, and this the most interesting format of the moment. Yes, it may offer the lowest performance of the lot, but these cards can fit into a combi slot that will also take SD cards. First announced in 2010 by SanDisk, Sony, and Nikon, XQD is a flash memory card using the PCI Express interface. XQD Version 2.0, announced in 2012, moved to the PCI Express 3.0 interface.

Unless you are a pure hobbyist or on a tight budget, we highly recommend getting a UHS-II card. They aren’t significantly more expensive anymore, and you’ll be happy you did, even if just for the decreased transfer-to-computer times. Speed Class The second is especially relevant for photographers. We tested how many seconds we could fire a Canon R5 at maximum framerate and resolution before we hit the limits of the buffer. This means we asked the camera to record both RAW and the highest quality JPEG and do so firing at the maximum 20 frames per second with the electronic shutter. The Results Disk Speed Tests Even if a card doesn’t even come close to the promised peak read or write speeds seen on the side of the box (which none of them did, by the way), it doesn’t matter. For video, Acer, which promised the least when it comes to read and write speeds, performed identically to Angelbird which promised the most. The Type B form factor, which we've seen in several Canon and Nikon cameras, offers even faster maximum theoretical performance. The new CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards feature a PCIe Gen4 interface with two lanes and a max theoretical throughput of 4 GB/s.