I’ve started accumulating “small” news announcements into a once-a-week story. This helps me be a little more productive and seems to align with the way most people are coming to this site (once or twice a week, but every week).
Here's last week's news for the Z System:
- Viltrox added two autofocus lenses to their Z-mount stable, the full frame 28mm f/1.8 and the 75mm f/1.2 (DX).
- The total number of third-party autofocus lenses for the Z-mount has now reached 24, though a few are still not yet available here in the US.
- The CompactFlash Association announced the specifications for CFexpress 4.0 (currently we're on CFexpress 2.0). Not much to see here, as this hand was tipped long ago: exact same form factor using the latest PCIe bus (Gen4) and NVMe (1.4c) standards. Current cards are PCIe Gen3.2 and NVMe 1.3, by comparison. With the new standards Type B CFexpress 4.0 cards will top out at 4GBs, twice as fast as theoretically possible with the CFexpress 2.0 cards. As has been the case since XQD kicked off this sequence, the new CFexpress 4.0 cards should be backwards compatible.
- Related to the above: ProGrade has announced the 3rd generation of their CFexpress cards (Cobalt), now supporting CFexpress 4.0. These cards come in 325GB, 650GB, and 1.3TB capacities, and have up to 2800MBs sustained write speeds, well above those required for the Z8 and Z9 recording 8K raw video. Likewise, ProGrade is going to offer a new CFexpress 4.0 Type B card reader, which can transfer at up to 40Gbps (essentially USB 4.0).
