SanDisk Announce CFast 2.0 Memory Card

Last year at Photokina 2012 Sandisk announced it is working on a new type of professional memory card called CFast 2.0 (see video above). This week the company unveiled the world’s first CFast 2.0 memory card Extreme Pro model (available in 60GB and 120GB capacities).

The new card is claimed to be extremely fast – according to Sandisk it will reach read speeds of up to 450MB/s and write speeds up to 350MB/s (speeds which you can currently find only on fast SSDs).

The CFast 2.0 format is not compatible with existing CF or SD memory types and the first camera to use it will be the newly announced ARRI AMIRA. The new card will allow the camera to record ProRes 4444 videos at up to 200fps. The older ARRI ALEXA video camera will be able to use the card as well with a special adapter.

CFast 2.0 is basically a competitor to the Sony/Nikon XQD card format (currently the only camera which support this format is the Nikon D4). The main target market for the new CFast 2.0 format are photographers looking to get into 4K video shooting but it might also interest Medium format pro still shooters as well and currently both Canon and Phase One have agreed to support the format (although no actual camera models have been released yet with CFast 2.0 support by those companies).

Price and availability for the first CFast 2.0 cards has not been announced yet.

An actual CFast card we shot during Photokina 2012 last year

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.