South Korean memory company Novachips announced new CFexpress 4.0 memory cards that promise to be as affordable as SD cards. Novachips’ new CFexpress Type A and Type B memory cards come in sizes ranging from 330GB to a whopping 3.2 TB, with prices starting at $199.
“As all of our CFexpress cards are in-house engineered and manufactured in-house, we can offer these premium cards at much more affordable rates even cheaper than SDs,” Novachips says. “The Type A Express and Extreme cards are available at a $200-300 price point, which are as affordable as SSDs.”
While some SD cards are very cheap, the fastest UHS-II V90 ones are reasonably expensive on a per-gigabyte basis. For example, a class-leading 512GB SD card is $499, or about a dollar per gigabyte. Another company’s 128GB UHS-II V90 SD card is $160, which is even more expensive per gigabyte.
The new Novachips 330GB Extreme CFexpress 4.0 Type A card is $199, or about $0.60 per gigabyte. The company’s latest 1.6TB “express” line CFexpress 4.0 Type A card is $329 — which is about $0.20 per gigabyte. In all cases, the new CFexpress 4.0 Type A cards are VPG 400 certified and approved by the CompactFlash Association.
“All of our cards have a custom-developed architecture for maximum heat dissipation, which is crucial for stable recording on cameras,” Novachips says. “The faster the card is, the hotter the card gets, therefore, good memory cards must have an architecture to dissipate this heat effectively.”
The Novachip CFexpress 4.0 Type A cards promise read and write speeds up to 1,600 MB/s, while the CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards, with double the bandwidth, offer read and write speeds up to 3,300 MB/s and 3,200 MB/s, respectively.
However, Novachips is quick to note that maximum speed is not the most critical factor.
“Maximum speed does not matter much in this business, as the cards get hot their speeds plummet. Our engineers focus more on [the] stability of a card than max speed.”
The CFepxress Type A cards come in four capacities, although the sizes vary by product category. The Novachips Extreme cards promise better performance and come in 330GB and 660GB sizes. The Express cards come in 800GB and 1.6TB capacities. The Extreme models are SLC-based and promise a longer lifespan and higher sustained speeds, while the Express cards are TLC-based and promise higher capacities.
“Most CFexpress 4.0 cards out there are TLC-based, but we offer two different solutions for professionals who often record and format multiple times a day. For those, our SLC-based Extreme cards will provide the longevity they need,” Novachips explains.
SLC stands for single-level cell, and flash memory stores single bits of data per single physical cell for more endurance and reliability at high operational temperatures. In contrast, TLC, or triple-level cell flash, stores triple bits of data per single cell to offer more data density at the expense of thermal stability. TLC should be fine for photographers, while SLC could be more stable for extreme video applications. In all cases, though, the new Novachips cards are, as mentioned, VPG 400 certified.
The Novachips CFexpress 4.0 Type B memory cards also come in Extreme and Express styles, with the Extreme card offering a terabyte of capacity and the Express one offering a whopping 3.2TB of storage.
The new Novachips CFexpress 4.0 Type A and Type B cards are available directly through Novachips’ official distributor, District Camera.
Image credits: Novachips
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