CFexpress Type A memory cards used to be extortionately expensive, with Sony having a stranglehold on the market. Thankfully those days are long gone, and the Type A market is wide open with plenty of competition and rapidly falling prices. And it seems those prices have hit an all-time low, as you can now pick up a 1TB Type A card for just $220 at Amazon (£163 at Amazon UK) - that's around $80 less than the next cheapest 1TB/960GB Type A offering.
Read more: the best CFexpress cards you can buy right now
The card in question is from a Chinese brand called Bilitu, and no, that's not a name I'm familiar with, either. In addition to the generous 1TB capacity, this is also a CFexpress 4.0 card, meaning it's around twice as fast as the first generation of Type A cards. Read/write speeds are claimed to be 1780MB/s and 1600MB/s, respectively. There's also a VPG400 rating, so the card should be capable of sustaining a minimum 400MB/s write rate during video recording, making it suitable for 8K raw capture.
The Bilitu card is also available in 256GB and 512GB capacities, and while both are also very well priced, it's the top 1TB version that offers the best value thanks to its lower price per gigabyte of storage.
But let's face it, it hardly matters how cheap this card is: if you've got the cash to drop on a high-end Sony camera with a Type A slot, you're not going to cheap-out on a Type A card from an unknown brand with questionable reliability. However, there is still a benefit from cards like this: they encourage a race to the bottom, with established manufacturers being forced to drop their prices in order to compete.
