Nextorage Just Made a Memory Card Unlike Any Other

It’s becoming pretty normal to see Nextorage at the forefront of memory card technology, at least as it performs to guaranteed sustained performance in professional video settings. It was the first to land VPG800 certification and it has another first announced today: the only CFexpress card that is both VPG400 and VPG1600 complaint, simultaneously.

Wait, What is VPG and Why Should I Care?

To recap, VPG stands for Video Performance Guarantee and is denotes a sustained write speed that has been verified under rigorous testing by the Compact Flash Association (CFA). VPG certification is coded at a firmware level and tells cameras that a card can in fact keep up with the most demanding video write speed requirements.

For example, Sony points out in its user manual for cameras that shoot at either high resolution or high framerate (or both) that it requires a CFexpress Type A card to score at least VPG200. The Alpha 1, for example, is one such camera to require this.

“Media cards bearing the VPG logo are certified by CFA. Some companies may inadvertently or incorrectly use the VPG logo without actually getting their cards CFA-certified, which risks failure during video recording such as dropped frames, or in the worst-case scenario, the camera shutting down,” the CFA says. It is for this reason that it maintains an active list of VPG certified cards.

As an aside, PetaPixel led an initiative to identify brands that were actively lying about VPG certification as it was a major problem in 2023. By early 2024, that problem had largely been solved, although it is still an issue with new or completely unknown brands (and this will likely always be the case with scam companies).

VPG has since grown to include not only VPG200 and VPG400, but a new CFexpress specification (Profile 5) now allows for VPG800 and VPG1600. These cards are wicked fast, but there is a problem: they aren’t backward compatible.

“Although VPG-5 and VPG-4 are profiles for CFexpress, VPG-5 is not backward compatible to VPG-4. A higher-performing card supporting the VPG800 or VPG1600 class won’t necessarily work with a camera mode that requires VPG200 or VPG400,” the CFA explains.

That’s where Nextorage’s accomplishment comes in.

Nextorage’s Elegant Solution

Initially, it was believed that filmmakers and photographers would have to pick between levels of VPG performance, but Nextorage has proven that isn’t the case. Today it announced that it has created the world’s first dual-compatibility VPG400 and VPG1600 memory card — the NX-B2PRO+ Series — and a quick check of the CFA’s list of certifications confirms the achievement.

“To ensure a seamless transition to next-generation standards, the company has leveraged its cutting-edge technology and experience in developing the NX-B2PRO+ Series,” Nextorage says. “In today’s production environments, performance demands on memory cards vary widely depending on the project and equipment used. By supporting both the new VPG1600 standard and the existing VPG400 standard, the NX-B2PRO+ Series provides creators with a reliable bridge to the future of high-performance video recording technology.”

At the time of publication, the number of VPG1600 cards was already minuscule: only Exascend has cards that have been certified for that level of performance (and the VPG1600 cards are not yet available). However, Exascend’s VPG1600 cards aren’t backward compatible like Nextorage’s, meaning Nextorage is likely to beat all companies not only to market with VPG1600 cards but is also the only option that will provide peak performance to both old and new camera systems. At this point, given that certification confirms these sustained speeds, it would be difficult to rationalize investing in a memory card that wasn’t backward compatible versus one that was.

The fact that this kind of dual compatibility is possible with no loss in performance is notable and once again highlights the advantages of the CFexpress format over SDexpress. As a reminder, SDexpress is technically backward compatible with current UHS-II devices, but it loses a huge amount of speed and drops to just UHS-I performance. SDexpress is also not nearly as fast as CFepress as a baseline.

Nextorage plans to start shipping its NX-B2PRO+ Series CFexpress Type B memory cards, which will be available in 1,330 GB and 660 GB configurations, in 2026. It did not share pricing plans.