For the past few Sony camera reviews, I’ve opted to move away from SD cards. Instead, I’ve been using the ProGrade Digital CFexpress 2.0 Type A 960GB Gold. They offer very good performance for the price tag. But more importantly, I’ve accepted the fact that I don’t necessarily need to use SD cards. I believe most photographers really just want to use those as they’ve been the standard for pretty much 20 years. Of course, computers and the need for tons of dongles have changed the way that we’ve worked. But in this case, I think I’m alright moving on to CF Express Type A.
So what’s better about CF Express Type A cards? Well, it’s better where it really counts:
- Faster performance for buffer speed when photographing wildlife
- It fits into the same-sized card slot
- You can still connect the camera to the computer via USB-C and download your photos
Really, that’s about it. Of course you can hold a lot of photos — and that’s important if you’re shooting wildlife images with very fast burst speeds. But otherwise, if you’re photographing people during an event, the big advantage is that you’ll probably be able to hold more images if you buy a higher end card than what you’ve got right now.
However, SD cards can always hold comparable amounts of photos. So the big thing here is that CF Express Type A is for those of us who forget that cameras are cameras and instead shoot them like the safety is off and you’re holding the trigger down. But if you’re shooting events in Single shot mode or in low continuous, you probably won’t need a CF Express Type A card. In fact, I really think that you won’t.
CF Express Type A was created by Sony. And it’s not the first time that they’ve tried to change the camera industry. For some years, they had cameras with memory stick duo in them. As it is, no other camera manufacturers uses Type A. Instead, they’ve all opted for Type B.
While I think that Type A works very well, I wouldn’t ever expect Canon, Nikon, or Panasonic to include it in their cameras. If anything, I think that the brands would probably rather stick an SSD into their cameras. With that said, Type A would be very hard to make a standard across various camera systems.
But man, are they nice.