The CFexpress Type A market continues to grow, at least in terms of card availability. The latest new Type A launch is from South Korean manufacturer Novachips, with its new Express and Extreme cards. Touted as being more affordable Type A cards, Novachips CFexpress cards are said to be engineered and manufactured in-house, enabling them to be "even cheaper than SDs".
Read more: the best CFexpress cards
Naturally, this depends on the SD card you select for comparison, but there's some truth to the claim. Novachips' 1.6TB CFexpress Type A card currently retails for $263.20, equating to a price -per-gigabyte of around $0.16. Compare that to the current cheapest 1TB UHS-II SD card available at B&H, the Sabrent 1TB Rocket UHS-II SDXC card, which is priced at $179.99 and therefore costs $0.18 per gigabyte. When you consider how much faster the Novachips' Type A card is, it's a clear value winner.
Two distinct Type A ranges are available, with both conforming to the fastest CFexpress 4.0 standard. This enables read speeds of up to 1700MB/s, with the fastest 'Extreme' cards capable of 1500MB/s sustained write speed. The higher-capacity 'Express' range is slightly slower, with sustained write rates between 1200MB/s and 1300MB/s, but that should still be plenty fast enough for recording 8K video. All Express and Extreme cards are VPG400 certified, meaning they're guaranteed to sustained 400MB/s during video recording.
What's more, in order to reliably sustain high recording speeds, Novachips states that “All of our cards have a custom-developed architecture for maximum heat dissipation". CFexpress 4.0 cards, especially the smaller Type A design, are prone to getting hot, limiting the duration that a card is able to safely operate at its peak speed. “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.”
Novachips also points out that the higher-speed Extreme Type A cards are built around SLC (single-level cell) memory chips, which are better able to sustain higher speeds and should provide a longer lifespan that TLC (triple-level cell) memory used in higher-capacity cards, which gives greater data density but with reduced thermal stability.
Novachips Express cards come in 800GB and 1.6TB capacities, priced at $194.65 and $263.20, respectively. The top-tier Extreme cards are available in 330GB and 660GB variants, costing $159.20 and $254.15.
The cards are already listed on Amazon.com.
