Lexar enters the XQD arena

It was already announced a while back, but we finally have another choice for our XQD cards: Lexar has them available now too.

The two new Lexar XQD memory cards come in 32GB and 64GB capacity. Good to hear is that they are extremely fast. With a minimum guaranteed read transfer speed of 1100x (168 MB/s), they match that of the fastest Sony XQD cards (their S-series which I haven't yet been able to spot “in the wild” though). Write speed is lower, of course, but still MUCH faster than any non-XQD card around.  In fact, read performance is even faster than is theoretically possible with Compact Flash, let alone SD!

With no other camera than the Nikon D4 to make use of these super fast cards, it remains to be seen whether or not the XQD standard will survive. But boy, are these cards fast: in my D4 I can continue to shoot full res 14-bit raw files at 3.5-4 frames/sec after the buffer (already a whopping 75 images, good for 7.5 seconds at top speed) is filled up. And this with a previous generation Sony (125MB/s) XQD card…

Together with the cards, Lexar also developed a USB 3.0 XQD card-reader, allow for super fast data transfers between card and computer.

The cards have an MSRP of $299.99 (32GB) and $579.99 (64GB), the XQD USB 3.0 card reader will have an MSRP of $44.99. With these prices, they actually look cheaper than Sony's own offerings!

New memory card format: CFast

Although Sandisk was one of the co-developers of the new XQD memory card (as used in the Nikon D4 camera and currently only available from Sony and, soon, from Lexar), Sandisk has never indicated they were going to actually develop a memory card for this format. It now becomes clear why: Sandisk chose to adopt a different memory card format altogether: CFast.

CFast is an upgrade of the current Compact Flash memory card and uses a new interface, promising speeds of up to 600MB/s. This will be great news for both the action/sports shooter as well as videographers. Although no actual cards or cameras that support this new format are yet available on the market, Phase One has already indicated they will likely adopt the CFast format in the near future.

I wonder what this new format will bring us and which of the two fast memory card formats will eventually survive: XQD or CFast?

Lexar announces XQD memory cards

After Sony's recent announcement of bigger and faster XQD memory cards, Lexar just announced they will be making XQD cards of their own too.

The XQD memory card specification was developed by Nikon, Sony, and Sandisk together, to be able to build faster memory cards than possible with Compact Flash. It is therefore interesting to see that instead of Sandisk, Lexar is going to be the second manufacturer of XQD cards besides Sony…

Apart from announcing availability of the new Lexar XQD cards “this quarter,” details on size, speed, and cost have not been made available yet. Also unknown is whether or not they will be manufacturing an accompanying card reader as well.

At this moment the Nikon D4 is the only camera that makes use of these fast XQD memory cards. Lexar's initiative, however, can be seen as an indication that the XQD card will be more widely adopted in the (near) future.