ProGrade Digital’s new SD card is wicked fast, affordable & designed for 4K workflows
posted Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 3:30 PM EST
Hopefully not getting lost in the news regarding CFexpress, ProGrade Digital has also announced a new high-end SD card that is capable of supporting even the beefiest of 4K workflows that will start shipping in May. While their current SD card announced at launch is fine for most cameras, it doesn't have the write speed necessary for something like the 5D Mark IV's hefty Motion JPEG 4K video files. I did test the card in the new GH5S and it works just fine, but more speed is always welcome. Well, more speed is what we got, as the new card is quoted to come in at 250 MB/s read speeds... and like all ProGrade cards we've tested, exceeds that spec.
As an SDXC UHS-II, U10 and V90 rated card, ProGrade's new "Cobalt" level SD card is one of the fastest SD cards we have tested, outclassed only by cards like Sony's extremely high-end "G" series and Lexar's high-performance 2000x memory cards (SanDisk has an Extreme card that is stated to get up to 300 MB/s, but fails to get anywhere near that spec in our testing).
ProGrade told us that they decided to make this memory card so that it fit with Panasonic's minimum requirements on paper (though as stated, their old card does technically work with the new GH5S) and also support the 5D Mark IV's 4K Motion JPEG.
In our testing, this new ProGrade Cobalt card reached 170.4 MB/s write and 266.3 MB/s read speeds.
In contrast, their current Gold card we tested to reach 57 MB/s write and 147.2 MB/s read.
The ProGrade Digital Cobalt V90 SD UHS-II card will be available in 64GB, 128GB & 256GB capacities at $99.99, 189.99 and $379.99 respectively. If you look at the competition, that's well-priced coming in for less than SanDisk, Sony and Lexar with similar performance and the same storage capacity. As far as we can see, this card will work excellently for everythiing on the market shooting to SD cards in 4K. Now that ProGrade can support even the 5D Mark IV's huge video files, they've pretty much covered the market for the time being.