Sony Powers Up Its Cameras With Next-Gen CFexpress 4.0 Cards

So, big news for Sony Alpha camera owners and shooters. Lexar has announced that they will be the first memory card manufacturer to bring support for the newer (and much faster) CFexpress 4.0 standard to Type-A cards, which will be quite welcomed for Sony users as that’s the only format that can be utilized in Sony’s mirrorless Alpha series.

Lexar will be releasing the Professional CFexpress 4.0 Type-A card as part of its “Gold” series and looks like they will be doing so before Sony can release this new card type themselves — which is quite impressive, if not a bit perplexing as well.

And while we don’t know all of the details just yet regarding price or release date, here’s what we do know about these new Lexar CFexpress 4.0 standard cards and how you might be able to use them to speed up your Sony Alpha series videography.

Lexar CFexpress 4.0 Type-A Cards

According to notes from Lexar, the company plans to use the integration of PCIe Gen 4 as part of these new Type-A cards, which will reportedly have a maximum read speed of 1,800 MB/s and a maximum write speed of 1,650 MB/s. Both of these numbers are blazing fast and should be welcomed by any Sony shooters looking to run-and-gun and manage their highest-end footage.

We don’t have any details about a minimum sustained transfer rate just yet, however these Lexar cards do appear to meet the Compact Flash Association’s Video Performance Guaranteed 400 rating, which basically means that these cards will at the very least be able to stay above 400 MB/s.

The Future of Sony Alpha Cameras

It’s also worth noting that while this news has come out, at this point, there are no Sony Alpha cameras that are currently capable of fully utilizing these insane new speeds. Even the Sony a9 III will be limited below these thresholds, so if any new Sony cameras would like to reach these read and write speeds, they’ll need to be revised before release (or perhaps after a firmware update or two).

It does sound like these cards will be backward compatible, so if you do invest in them when they come out, you’ll be able to work just fine in any current Sony cameras; they just won’t be fully utilized just yet.

Price and Availability

Sadly, at this point, Lexar has not announced when these new cards will be released or what price point they’ll sell at.

However, Lexar also announced other new options, like a new CFexpress 4.0 Type B card as part of its Diamond series that should reach a maximum read speed of 3,600 MB/s and a maximum write speed of 3,300 MB/s. Plus, a new microSD UHS-II card tailored for action cameras will reach maximum read speeds of 280 MB/s and maximum write speeds of 180 MB/s.

So, if you’re looking for just news and specs, Lexar has you covered. We’ll let you know the rest as more updates come out.