ProGrade Digital makes a wide range of memory cards, targeting their products at the professional market. While their Iridium line of CFexpress Type A cards have already shown fantastic performance in my hands-on review, the combination of their blazing speed and larger capacities left them with a higher MSRP (although still at a good price per GB, to be clear). With the Gold line, ProGrade is bringing many of the desirable features to a lower pricepoint and capacity.
Specifications
The Gold line for CFexpress Type A at launch features one SKU: a 120 GB capacity card. This card is fully compliant with the CompactFlash Association 2.0 specification and has a VPG200 rating, both of which show that ProGrade is taking a serious approach to standards compliance—while some budget-focused cards have had issues with non-compliance, that shouldn't be an issue here.
Beyond the standards, the Gold card is rated for "normal" speeds for CFexpress Type A cards at this price point. Maximum read speeds of 900 MB/s, burst write speeds of 800 MB/s, and sustained write speeds of 450 MB/s all mean that this card will massively outperform SD cards in Sony cameras that offer SD/CFexpress Type A interoperability. It will also mean you'll get excellent ingest performance when reading from the card. While the faster Iridium line cards will still deliver even faster reads and writes, the Gold card will make a noticeable difference in buffer-clearing and ingest operations.
With a VPG200 rating, which ensures minimum sustained writes of 200 MB/s, you'll also be able to access some video shooting modes that require this rating—those will be modes like the highest frame rates in slow-motion shooting.
In addition to speed, ProGrade has also kept all the desirable features of their other cards present. The card has thermal throttling to protect it from overheating, while a laser-etched serial numbering system helps ensure quality control. The card is rated for an expansive temperature range of 14°F to 158°F (-10°C to 70°C), along with x-ray proof and shock-proof durability claims.
Lastly, the card is "Refresh Pro" ready, which indicates it works with ProGrade's Refresh Pro Software and readers to monitor card health, perform deep cleaning to restore performance, and update firmware.
Overall, at the MSRP of $159.99, this card is a competitive option for Sony shooters, particularly when looking at a price per GB comparison. The level of features and quality of build that ProGrade applies to their higher end cards is also present, which is really nice to see. The ProGrade CFexpress Type A Gold-class card is available to purchase from B&H.
I've had to start looking at these CF/XQD memory cards more as hard drives than as memory cards. Looking at them like memory cards makes it hard to swallow the cost of these suckers. Even the most "affordable" ones are still very expensive.
With how much prices have fallen and capacities have risen, I think CFE-A is now genuinely accessible. To be clear, SD is still way cheaper, but if you want the buffer or offload performance, CFE-A no longer feels like a total rip-off, like it did even a year or two ago. Plus two of these cards are only about 10% of the purchase price of the A7R V or similar camera - for maximum performance, that's really not a bad markup compared to things like additional RAM on a MacBook.
It is true that they have gotten significantly cheaper. That's great. Especially for those people that need those speeds. But those that don't need those speeds are more than fine being serviced by SD cards. I personally still have not yet encountered a situation in my own work where I need the blazing fast speed of CF Express cards. I don't need to shoot 100 high res raw images a second with long buffers. I don't need to shoot high bit rate 4k-8k raw video. I just don't want to spend a bunch of money on something I'm not going to use. My V30 cards have been working just fine for shooting the 10bit 4:2:0 N-RAW. If that's what works for me why would I want to spend more? I don't need more than that.
Well if you don't buy a Mac you can avoid the Apple tax and get 32gb of ram for $130 instead of $400+. 32gb isn't even currently offered on their lower tier computers. Apple isn't the only company that does this though. Some windows laptop makers do the same thing Apple does. It used to be easier to avoid but these companies are pulling an Apple and soldering the memory modules to the mother board so you HAVE to spend more at check out if you need more ram. Some do it with hard drive space as well.
You used to be able to buy a base model on ALL windows laptops and then buy 3rd party ram/HardDrive after. You can still do it with most windows laptops but it's becoming more and more common for hardware manufacturers to lock stuff down and charge out the butt for stuff that has no reason costing as much as it does. Not only that but if you want a certain part upgraded well too bad you have to spend more money on this other part upgrade before we'll give you the option to upgrade the one part you originally wanted to upgrade. It's pretty shitty anti consumer business practices but hey, that's capitalism I guess.