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Currently, Pergear has an excellent sale on CFexpress Type A cards. These (typically) obnoxiously pricey cards are almost solely used in high end Sony cameras, and are often twice the price of a SDXC V90. But for the next while, Pergear is selling the 512GB version for just $188, which is less than the cheaper versions of the V90 cards on the market.

Pergear has been in the industry for a while, making not only memory cards of various stripes, but lenses, gimbals, and even a thermal camera. So they have the added benefit of not being a fly-by-night Chinese company that’s likely to disappear in a year. That said, there is some inconsistency in the claims they make. Pergear offers both “Standard” (the price I quoted above) and “Prime” versions of card (for roughly $30 more). The 780 MB/s max speed of the Standard is nearly double that of the Prime, while it lists the “sustained” speed as 380 MB/s, compared to a much higher “minimum” speed of the Prime…. But sustained and minimum aren’t identical terms, so it’s impossible to know how they compare. The chatter online, however, is very positive for both versions of the card, with no complaints of failure or slow buffering. There’s a rumor that the Prime version has a metal body and the Standard does not, but I can tell you that the Standard in fact does have a metal body, so I’m not sure what that’s about.

I purchased the Standard version for video use with my Sony a1. It handles XAVC S-I 4K recording at 60p, 422 10bit (600M) without errors. That’s not my normal format– I typically shoot in 8K. While I’ve only had the card for a short while, I don’t expect any problems. The advantage of CFexpress Type A cards is that there’s a little bit of future-proofing comparied to the V90. I’m not sure all of my versions of that card can handle S-I footage.

They are offering steep discounts on a range of Type A card capacities from $80GB to a terabyte in both the Standard and Prime versions. You can find this deal on Amazon as well (if you’re stressed about the possibility of returns), but I like to buy from the source when possible. I’ll keep highlighting great deals on our cinematography gear blog as I find them….