INTRODUCTION

   Even though i was always fascinated by photography (at least ever since i got a Polaroid camera in the early 90's) i never really found the time to take things a step further from being yet another amateur photographer. Still, I've had many Nikon, Canon, Olympus and Panasonic cameras over the years and the one thing they all had in common was finding the proper memory card to use. This may sound harder than what it was but that's actually not the case, not when i was always getting the latest consumer and semi-professional models with the highest resolutions (Megapixels) which in turn meant they needed the latest and fastest memory cards to hit the market. Currently I’m using two Nikon D3500 and a Canon EOS 800D cameras all of which i equip with the fastest SD and microSD cards that make their way to the lab. Still professional photographers have in large part moved away from SD and microSD cards to the latest and fastest CompactFlash format called CFexpress so i decided to start testing such memory cards as well starting with the Professional Gold 256GB Type B model by Lexar.

   For more than 25 years, Lexar has been a trusted leading global brand of memory solutions. Our award-winning lineup includes memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, solid-state drives and DRAM. With so many options, it’s easy to find the right Lexar solution to fit your needs. All Lexar product designs undergo extensive testing in the Lexar Quality Labs with more than 1,100 digital devices, to ensure performance, quality, compatibility, and reliability. Lexar products are available worldwide at major retail and e-tail stores. For more information or support, visit www.lexar.com.

   The Professional Gold is a CFexpress Type B line of cards (currently available in 64/128/256/512GB capacities) which basically means that they are based on the PCIe 3.0 NVMe v1.3 standard with 2 lanes (Gen3x2). Worth noting is that there are also CFexpress Type A cards that feature a single lane (Gen3x1) and also the upcoming Type C cards that feature 4 lanes (Gen3x4) meaning these are slower and faster respectively compared to Type B cards like the Professional Gold series by Lexar. So yes, CFexpress cards are basically the same as PCIe 3.0 (Gen3) NVMe SSDs and are thus capable of reaching read speeds of up to 4000MB/s (for the upcoming Type C models). For now, however CFexpress Type B holds the speed crown and with performance numbers of up to 1750MB/s for reads and 1000MB/s for writes these cards are over 3 times faster than the fastest micro SD and SD cards out there today (over 5 times in reads and 3 times in writes to be precise). Of course, to fully take advantage of CFexpress Type B cards and their impressive performance you also need a compatible USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 card reader and since Lexar also has one available, I’ll be using it to test and see just how their 256GB Professional Gold CFexpress Type B card compares to some of the fastest SD and microSD cards out there.