Nikon XQD Card for US Order: Isn’t it too late when the CFExpress card has become popular?

Nikon has announced that it will release two versions of its own XQD memory cards more than a year ago, around mid-2018, but until now, but so far, those XQD cards had not yet been put on sale by Nikon outside of Japan. Today, the B&H store opened a pre-order registration for these Nikon XQD memory cards, but only the 64GB version.

Hasn’t Nikon’s move come too late? When the new CFExpress Type B memory card has been released, it can be mounted and backward compatible with XQD devices via firmware updates from a certain company, its speed is faster, higher capacity and almost the same price as these older XQDs.

This is a picture from the list of CFexpress memory cards being sold at Bhphotovideo.com, we see that the price is quite acceptable with many manufacturers and various capabilities, such as SanDisk, Progred Digital, Delkin devices or even Lexer.

While compared to the price of the Nikon XQD memory card, only 64GB capacity is sold, but still available for pre-order only. This Nikon XQD memory card is capable of reading at real speeds up to 440MB/s and writes at real speeds up to 400MB/s. And here is the price of two Nikon XQD cards with 64GB and 120GB versions, but only sold in Japan, if calculating the exchange rate, it is even more expensive than the US price.

Currently, only a few Nikon cameras such as the D5, D850, D500, Nikon Z6, and Z7 have XQD card reader slots and Nikon has previously revealed a roadmap for updating new firmware to these cameras can support CFexpress memory cards because both XQD and CFExpress Type B use the same pin as XQD so manufacturers only need to adjust the firmware so that devices can use the new card standard.

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