Sony MRW-G1 XQD/CFx Type B Card Reader

I just don't see XQD cards failing out of the blue; I've never had card failures in XQD or CF cards (let alone CFexpress which I've only used a few times) over all the years that I've been using them (hundreds of thousands of images) but as much as one half of my SD cards have failed (with less use). I believe the main reason for the failure is that the electrical contacts are openly visible and easily touched accidentally when handling the cards, and the other is the lack of a rugged chassis in the SD cards. I doubt my XQD cards will fail within the lifetime of the cameras that take them. There is a difference in the design between consumer card formats such as SD or MemoryStick where it is designed to be as cheap and as small as possible rather than as rugged as possible (which is the case for XQD and CFexpress).

To me, CFexpress doesn't seem like quite the success some hoped it to be. It was thought that all major manufacturers now join on one high-speed card format of the future, but this didn't quite go like that as Sony diverged and chose the smaller CFexpress type A card for their cameras, and not the type B that Canon and Nikon are using. They haven't even upgraded the camcorders that use XQD to use CFexpress type B, as far as I know. I can't not think that this is intentional and they are trying to avoid using the same cards that their main rival (Canon) use. Canon similarly refused the XQD format earlier and even now they don't support XQD in their CFexpress type B compatible cameras. This lack of shared card strategy across manufacturers makes it more costly to switch between brands and harder for users of different brands of equipment to work together. So there is little real progress in standardization. The actually realized speeds are also significantly behind the nominal speeds of the cards and there is a great deal of inconsistency in the performance reported, likely this is because card temperature affects the speed and the camera processing is not really optimized to take advantage of the new cards. I don't see still camera manufacturers adding fans to the cameras but perhaps better heat sinks can be used to keep the cards cool. In professional video cameras, fans typically activate between takes, when the camera is not recording. However, still camera users are not used to fan noise. (Exception: some flashes such as the SB-5000 have a fan but then I don't know if it is all that popular).

Anyway, both XQD and CFexpress type B seem to work fine and I use them interchangeably. Since I don't do video regularly, and I'm not a heavy burst user, I don't run into problems with either card; the buffer performance is fine for my use. I guess what I would like to see next is Nikon putting dual CFe/XQD slots in more of their cameras so that making in-camera backups would have less impact on performance. But again this is not a serious concern for me and I'm happy using just one slot for most situations since I have high confidence in the CFe/XQD cards. Dual card writing is mainly something I do when photographing something particularly important (the extreme winter conditions experienced earlier this month was one such situation where I had both slots in use). I get it that SD cards are very popular and manufacturers are afraid of forcing more expensive media on users. But the cost of memory cards is still quite small compared to cameras and lenses and I genuinely believe the files are more safe on CFexpress and XQD cards.