Sony’s New CFexpress Card Has Huge 2TB Capacity, Eye-Watering Price

Sony has reclaimed the title of the largest CFexpress Type A card with its new 1,920GB capacity monster. That’s a ton of storage, but it comes with a similarly high asking price.

The nearly 2TB card tops Angelbird’s 1TB card that launched in April and puts more emphasis on total storage capacity over anything else. While it promises maximum read speeds of up to 700 MB/s and read speeds of up to 800 MB/s, it doesn’t necessarily hit those numbers all the time as it is only rated as a VPG 200 card.

VPG, or Video Performance Guarantee, is a standard first created in 2011 by the Compact Flash Association (CFA) and rates cards for their maximum sustained write speeds so that primarily video shooters know what media are capable of recording high-data rate footage. VPG 400 is the most commonly seen rating and states that the card will never dip below 400 MB/s write speeds.

Sony’s lower capacity CFexpress Type A cards are rated as VPG 400, but this new 1,920GB card prioritizes total storage over speed and is only rated as VPG 200, indicating it only promises to sustain a maximum of 200 MB/s write speeds. Sony doesn’t seem too bothered by this, however.

“For video shooters, the VPG 200 Video Performance Guarantee rating enables stable recording at 200 MB/s with no dropped frames for an extended period, even when recording XAVC S-I 4K footage and high bitrates,” the company says.

“An original alloy with superior heat transmission characteristics is used to conduct heat out of the cards and maintain optimum performance. This results in long-term stability and reliable operation when internally recording the large volume of data required for 4K 120p video.”

The promise of stable 4K 120p recording is notable, since few photographers would ever need a card with this massive capacity. In fact, many photographers are leery of relying on a single card to hold as many photos as a 1TB capacity card could house, let alone double that.

That high capacity also comes with a price — literally. Sony is asking $1,400 for this new card, more than double what Angelbird asks for its 1TB VPG 400 memory card. Shooters will have to decide if a slower single 2TB capacity card is really worth $400 more than two, faster 1TB cards.

The Sony 1,920GB capacity CFexpress Type A cards will be available starting June 19.