First, an update on my yesterday’s Lexar post – a report from the PhotoPlus Expo sent in by a reader (thanks):
Peter, in spite of everything, Lexar has a manned booth at PhotoPlus and I spent a decent amount of time talking to them. One employee there gave me a bit of a background on everything that’s been happening. From the way he describes it, Micron would sell flash memory to Longsys, who would assemble the cards with Lexar packaging, and ship out to Lexar for distribution. The rise in flash memory prices meant the white label manufacturing process and marketing costs were lost profits for Micron, as they could sell the flash memory for higher prices elsewhere. The flash shortage is temporary, and prices should come down. More importantly, according to this employee, there is a warehouse full of Lexar CF/SD/XQD cards in Tennessee, ready to go. The only issue is that they have Micron/Lexar packaging, as opposed to the Longsys/Lexar packing. That is going to be remedied with some sort of temporary license, and the cards should be ready to go relatively soon. Again, according to this employee, the new Lexar products should be identical in quality to the old ones, as very little is actually changing. Lexar, with its 40 employees has a new owner, but it’s the owner who’s been the actual manufacturer all along.
Also, per the same Lexar employee, CFExpress is essentially the next revision of XQD, and there should be full backward compatibility with XQD, and that getting D4/D5/500/D850’s to work with CFE cards should be a simple software patch.
The last part is interesting because Delkin recently confirmed to a reader (thanks broxibear) that their CFExpress cards will not work in any current camera that uses an XQD slot:
Delkin is the only manufacturer to announce a CFExpress card so far.
Some other publications have confirmed that CFexpress will be the backward compatible with XQD (Resourcemagonline, Fotosidan)
“Rather than allow the two competing standards to drive up the price of memory, the CFA and its members developed a new type of memory: CFexpress. The best part? Because it’s PCIe and because PCIe is backwards compatible, XQD will continue to work on CFexpress cameras… and, theoretically, any camera produced to work with CFexpress will work with any XQD card currently on the market.”
Another rumor is that Hoodman is going to start making XQD memory cards as well (they already sells SD memory cards).
Expect also Lexar to make some new announcements at the 2018 CES show in January.
Update – Rego also announced their CFExpress plans.
