Today we continue our series of CFexpress Type A memory card reviews and this time around we are reviewing the largest CFexpress Type A card that we have ever used – the ExAscend CFexpress Type A 480GB alongside the company’s CFexpress Type A card reader.
exAscend
ExAscend makes reliable SSD storage in a variety of form factors for different industrial sectors as well as the cinema world. Their camera card lineup includes SD, CFast, and CFexpress type B cards, and now they’re also offering CFexpress Type A cards.
The new 480GB CFexpress Type A card is full of future-proofing technologies. It’s rated for 8K footage and offers protection against shocks, vibrations, and magnetism with a rugged aluminum casing.
Ever since Sony launched its A7S III camera back in October 2020 (1st camera to support CFexpress Type A cards), there have been a number of CFexpress Type A card announcements from different manufacturers besides Sony itself. We’ve compared these cards to Sony’s original in previous videos, and they all performed well in our tests (see our reviews of the CFexpress Type A cards from Prograde, Lexar, and Delkin).
Today we’re looking at a new competitor that offers the same specs at a discount with an interesting capacity offering. Let’s do some tests to see how it compares.
The new ExAscend CFexpress Type A 480GB Card and reader
Testing
The A1 is still the only Sony camera that offers 30fps bursts. We’ll use this camera with the exAscend card to check if it can beat our previous benchmarks. In our previous card comparison tests, we got over 200 images in 10 seconds and about 350MB/s write speed.
We set the A1 to electronic shutter in High+ drive mode (30fps), shooting compressed RAW files, using our Voigtlander 65mm f/2 manual focus lens with a 1/250 shutter speed. The benchmark average that we recorded with previous tests was 226 images in 10 sec. The exAscend recorded 230 images on average in multiple tests, so it’s definitely a worthy competitor.
The next test is buffer clearing. The exAscend card was able to clear 122 images in 11 seconds, a really good result compared to the benchmark average of 113 images in 11 seconds from 3 of the other cards we tested.
Card reader transfer speed
While companies advertise speeds that they achieve in a lab, a real-world test will show the card’s actual speed. We performed a file transfer using exAscend’s card reader. It’s a simple and portable unit with an aluminum body. It has a USB-c port on the back and reads SD as well as CFexpress Type A cards.
Our previous computer transfer tests recorded an average of 223MB/sec write and 345MB/sec read speed. Surprisingly, the exAscend did very well, with a 301MB/sec write and 370MB/sec read when transferring about 100GB of video footage to and from the computer.
Conclusion
Since Sony released this card format over two years ago, CFexpress Type A prices have gone down considerably although they are still higher compared to CFexpress Type B cards of similar sizes. It’s still not a necessity for video recording though. Most fast SD cards are able to write most 10-bit video files.
The only video settings that require a CFexpress Type A card on the Sony A1 and A7SIII are XAVC S-I format in 4K at 120p and 1080 at 240p. Trying to shoot in both these modes using even our fastest V90 card resulted in an error message.
Besides this, the main advantage over an SD card is faster transfer to the computer. It’s definitely a time saver, especially when you offload 480GB of footage. Other than that, CFexpress Type A cards are still a specialty tool at this point. But with more options coming to the market and bringing the price down, they’ll eventually become the new standard.
Pricing
As for pricing, the 480Gb exAscend CFexpress Type A card sells for $900. This isn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but the somewhat larger Sony 640GB CFexpress Type A card currently sells for $1250 so if you want a large capacity CF-A and don’t want to spend more than a grand it is certainly an option (the company also offers smaller cards in 120GB, 180GB, 240GB and 360GB capacities ranging from $190-$650). The exAscend card reader sells for $75.
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Why should you trust us?
Anlebird 1 tb cfa cost only half of the, i use them regulary
You do realize that this was announced before the Angelbird right?