Lexar Diamond CFexpress Type B Review

The Lexar Diamond is the latest CFexpress Type-B memory card from Lexar. The card comes with some nice features like XQD backward compatibility, VGP-400 certification but is also the fastest CFexpress Type B card out there to date.

A quick disclaimer – Lexar as well as a few other brands do send me samples of their cards or readers. Lexar has been very professional, and quick at answering any questions which has been very helpful.

Lexar Diamond – Adorama / B&H

What I Like – XQD Backward Compatible, VGP-400 Certified, Fastest card available currently, Lifetime warranty.

Who is this card for? – While a lot of the first-generation CFexpress Type-B cameras did not have the technology to support the fastest speeds of the CFexpress card, the latest batch of professional cameras do. Cameras like the Nikon Z9, Fujifilm X-H2s, and Panasonic GH6 can really benefit from these new faster CFexpress cards.

Not only that but since the Lexar Diamond is XQD backward compatible, photographers that are still using older Nikon DSLRs in conjunction with their new mirrorless cameras can get some quality-of-life improvement by having one card that works with both systems.

Tech Specs

1900 MB/s read speeds and 1700MB/s write. 

1600MB/s Sustained write speeds

VPG 400 – 400MB/s guaranteed minimum write speeds.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are taken with the Lexar CFexpress reader for USB 10Gbps speeds and the OWC Thunderbolt 3 Reader for 20Gbps speeds. 4GB file sizes are tested for the USB C and TB3 read and write speeds and 64GB file sizes are tested for the Heat speeds where we see how well the cards perform when thermal throttling.

Both new cards have very good performance with some of the fastest read speeds on the market with some very impressive high heat speeds.

You can compare the new Lexar cards to any other brand of cards in this list of the Best CFexpress Type B Memory Cards with included benchmarks – this also explains the testing methodology.

In-Camera Benchmarks

More important than the USB speed are how the cards perform in the camera.

I have benchmarked this card in most of the latest cameras and it is without a doubt the best-performing card in terms of speed and consistency at the time of writing this.

I’m still compiling a lot of the data for these benchmarks which will take a few weeks.

Nikon Z9 Memory Cards Benchmarks

Nikon Z7 II Memory Card Benchmarks

Fujifilm X-H2s Memory Card Benchmarks

Canon R5 Memory Card Benchmarks

Panasonic GH6 Memory Card Benchmarks

I/O Transactions

Again using AJA System test we can look at the I/O transactions to see how the card is thermal throttling.

I couldn’t really get this card to throttle, so I pushed it as hard and as hot as I could by doing several 64GB read and write sequences – still consistent performance. This is what currently makes this one of the best cards.