Sony has released a $4,000 CFexpress memory card with a huge capacity of 1,920GB. If you're wondering why anyone would need a card that big, you're probably not alone.
For photographers shooting RAW or variations of 'high efficiency' RAW formats, realistically you would be hard pressed to fill a 256GB CFexpress card, even if you were shooting an all-day wedding. In fact, the thought of storing more than 1TB of images on a single card would be a scary thought for most photographers.
As a backup card, it makes more sense, but these high capacity cards also come at a very high cost. So generally, cheap SD cards of 128GB capacity have plenty of space for dozens of shoots, particularly if the images are saved in JPG format.
So why on earth do we need cards like Sony's 1920GB CFexpress card or Angelbird's even larger 4TB card?
Video for stills
Years ago it was hypothesised that photographers could shoot 8K video, and as a video is just a series of stills strung together, they could simply extract specific frames from the video. Think shooting a fashion video where there is a lot of dynamic motion from the model, and then having the option of obtaining individual frames for the perfect capture.
This is all nice in theory, but data management would be ridiculous and as most films are shot at 24 or 25 frames per second (fps) @ 1/50th of a second – you would end up with a lot of motion blur.
Perhaps shooting at 100fps at 1/200th would make more sense – but then again, that is a still a crazy amount of data and frames to go through.
With cards like this, however, the concept is a step closer to reality.
Shooting in 8K
Shooting 8K video uses an insane amount of data. One hour of 8K RedCode Raw 75, amounts to 7.29TB of data. That’s 121.5GB per minute for Raw 8K footage, or over 1TB for 10 minutes.
Of course, shooting in 8K gives you plenty of latitude in post allowing you to digitally zoom, pan or punch into footage and then export in 4K.
The other thing to consider when shopping for CFexpress is the data rate. The new Sony card has a data rate of approximately 800MB/s read speed and 700MB/s write speed. While not as fast as some other Sony Tough cards of 1700MB/s, it is easily enough for video where you need a minimum of 235 MB/s for 4K 120 and 325 MB/s for 8K 30 Raw.
The new Sony CEA-M1920T 1920GB CFexpress Type A M series Memory Card retails for $3,999 and is available now.
Find out more at the Sony website.