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Hot on the heels of Exascend and Nikon, Lexar has announced what it claims is the “world’s fastest” CFexpress Type B memory card. The new Diamond-series cards will offer read speeds up to 1,900MB/s and write speeds up to 1,700MB/s. They will also be VPG400-certified, ensuring write speeds always stay above 400MBps, so they should be perfect for underwater shooters recording 8K RAW video internally on cameras like the Nikon Z9 and Sony Alpha 1. Lexar also unveiled new Gold-series CFexpress Type A cards, which will offer read and write speeds of 900MB/s and 700MB/s, respectively. The cards will also carry the VPG400 rating.

According to Lexar, the new Diamond-series cards will be backwards compatible with “select cameras” with XQD card slots (since CFexpress Type B and XQD cards are physically identical), though CFexpress cards used in such slots will be bottlenecked to the considerably slower XQD speeds.

It is, however, a little premature to get excited: The new cards are “under development” and “should” be available in the second quarter of 2022. Not surprisingly then, at this time, Lexar hasn’t provided information on available capacities or pricing.