SanDisk Extreme Pro CFexpress Type B

£90-£520 / $150-$600 www.westerndigital.com

Along with Lexar, SanDisk is one of the most recognised memory brands. If offers a wide range of products, including the Extreme Pro CFexpress Type B card in four capacities, starting at 64GB and going up to 512GB. The smaller-capacity cards are particularly attractive, as they’re the most affordable, but have slower read and write speeds. The 64GB card, for example, is the slowest with a max read speed of 1500MB/s and a max write speed of 800MB/s. With read/write speeds of 1700/1400MB/s, the 512GB is the fastest card in the range. It’s also well priced for the card type and capacity, but at around £500/$500 is still more expensive than many are prepared to stomach.

While it adopts the familiar form factor, the SanDisk Extreme Pro CFexpress Type B eschews the metal casing on the sides that’s seen on the CFexpress cards from Delkin Devices, Lexar, Manfrotto and ProGrade Digital, but retains a metal plate on the front and back.

Like other CFexpress cards that we’ve tested, the SanDisk card cannot be inserted the wrong way around into a card slot; it simply doesn’t fit.

The SanDisk Extreme PRO CFexpress Type B does very well in regards to maximum continuous shooting rate and burst depth, consistently enabling up to 51 14-bit uncompressed raws to be captured in one sequence at 10fps in the Nikon Z 7II. Switching to shoot Fine-quality JPEGs, however, pushes the max burst depth to around 130. At 10fps, it takes 13 seconds to shoot 130 images, which seems a long time when you’re standing on the touchline or kneeling as your dog lollops towards you. In practice, you’re likely to shoot in shorter bursts, but it’s great to know that the card can match the camera’s capability. When testing transfer speeds, it also only took around 27 seconds to transfer 200 files from the Nikon Z 7II.

PROS Good range of capacities; attractively priced

CONS Large cards still costly; smaller cards offer slower speeds