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.