Wise released a batch of CFexpress Type-A memory cards last year that made lofty promises but weren’t certified to uphold them. The company has done the right thing and its new cards have more capacity options and are certified to be faster.
The company’s first CFexpress Type A cards came in 160GB and 512GB capacities and offered different promised levels of performance. While both had the same levels of peak read and write speeds, 820 MB/s and 730 MB/s respectively, the lower capacity card could sustain higher speeds: 650 MB/s. The higher capacity card only promised to sustain 200 MB/s.
Those promised sustained speeds, however, weren’t verified by the Compact Flash Association, so neither card was VPG certified. Lacking certification didn’t look like a problem as long as the cards could achieve what Wise promised but in practice, but the opposite is actually true. Sony requires VPG certification in order to unlock the highest-end video recording capabilities on some of its cameras, meaning without it, certain frame rates would be locked even if the card was theoretically capable of handling the data throughput.
Since this was made more broadly known, multiple memory card manufacturers who were skirting around VPG certification have fallen in line and Wise is the latest to follow suit. The availability of its Type A cards has returned and not only are there more capacity options, the speeds are consistent across all of them and they are VPG certified.
“Now that we are VPG certified and fully compliant with industry standards, Alpha users can make a choice,” Wise Senior Product Manager, Frank Wang, says. “It’s about authenticity and reliability, right? There are options now.”
All three of the Wise CFexpress 4.0 Type A Mk-II models unlock the full potential of Alpha cameras and support all video codecs including the slow-and-quick modes in HD and 4K in XAVC S-I format.
Wise no longer publishes maximum sustained write speed promises as it did before, only stating the definition of VPG400: write speed will never dip below 400 MB/s. It does say that its new cards, which are available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities, have a peak read performance of 1,865 MB/s and peak write speeds of 1,750 MB/s.
The Wise CFexpress 4.0 Type A Mk-II cards will be available early June and will reetail for $219.99, $359.99, and $549.99 respectively. Not only are these cards now legit and way faster, they are actually cheaper on a dollar-to-gigabyte scale than the first generation cards.
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