Angelbird AV PRO CFexpress Type A v4 Explained – VPG800 Certification, Up to 1.6TB, and Roman Rabitsch on the Storage Crisis

by Nino LeitnerToday

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At IBC 2026, I talked to Angelbird founder and CEO Roman Rabitsch to talk about the company’s new AV PRO CFexpress Type A v4 cards, a line built around the Sony FX5 and its X-OCN RAW and high frame rate modes, with capacities running from 200GB all the way up to 1.6TB and VPG800 certification on the AV PRO models. We also got into the much bigger question hanging over everyone right now: why memory prices have exploded, and whether they will ever come back down.

I’ll admit I’m predominantly a Sony shooter these days, and Sony has always been a bit special with its media. First Memory Sticks, then XQD, and now, finally, a standard everyone else could use, but in fact only Sony uses. A few Sony bodies take CFexpress Type B, but the majority of the current lineup, from the a7 series through the FX3, FX2, FX30, FX6, and now the FX5, runs on Type A. Angelbird announced its fourth-generation Type A cards a few days before the show, and we covered the announcement here, so this conversation was my chance to ask Roman why they exist and what actually changed inside.

New NAND, new controller, and VPG800

Roman’s short version: Angelbird adapted the latest NAND flash and the latest controller technology, rewrote the firmware to match, and packed it all into a new internal design. The result is a card family that carries VPG400 certification, which is what the FX5 requires for internal X-OCN recording, and on top of that, VPG800.

That second number is the interesting one. Nothing in Sony’s current lineup needs VPG800 today. Roman reasons that the FX5 is, in his words, a beast that can clearly grow new features over firmware, and that some of those features (or those on cameras that follow in the next year or two) will probably require a higher sustained bitrate. Rather than ship another VPG400 card and replace it in eighteen months, Angelbird built the headroom in now. I asked the obvious follow-up: if I shoot 4K at 240 frames per second on the FX5, do I need the new cards? No, according to Roman. The existing Angelbird Type A cards still work for everything the FX5 does right now; the v4 line is about what comes next.

There is a second, less glamorous reason for the new generation, and Roman was refreshingly open about it. Moving to the newest NAND and controller was also a supply decision. With the market for DRAM and NAND flash as strange as it currently is (more on that below), building on the latest silicon is how Angelbird secures long-term availability for its channel. The card exists partly because the older components are getting harder to guarantee.

What the newer process does and does not change

I wanted to know whether the newer NAND buys you anything in longevity. Roman’s answer was measured: each new process generation shrinks the structure, which means the card produces a bit less heat and draws a bit less power. Those two things go hand in hand. But from the user’s point of view, he said, the cards behave identically to the previous generation. You will not feel a difference on set, and he was not going to claim one.

On paper, our announcement piece has the specifics: a maximum read speed of 1870 MB/s across the line, and sustained write speeds of 1000 MB/s for the 400GB card, 1500 MB/s for 800GB, and 1600 MB/s for the 1.6TB version, all with Angelbird’s Stable Stream technology to hold that write speed constant as the card fills. Compared to the sustained 650 MB/s of Angelbird’s earlier 1TB Type A card, that is more than double the sustained write on the top model.

Why 200, 400, 800, and 1,600 instead of 256, 512, and 1,024

This was the detail I found most interesting, and it explains something a lot of people have wondered about. For years, memory cards came in powers of two: 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024. Now Angelbird lists 200GB, 400GB, 800GB, and 1.6TB. Are these somehow different chips?

They are not. Roman explained that the raw NAND capacity is still the familiar power-of-two figure; a “1TB” card starts life as 1,024GB of flash. Every card then reserves a slice of that as over-provisioning, space the controller uses for wear leveling, garbage collection, and replacing worn cells. The industry baseline sits around 7.6 percent. Angelbird decided to reserve noticeably more than that, which is why the advertised numbers land at 200, 400, 800, and 1,600 rather than 256, 512, and 1,024.

The trade-off is deliberate. Less user-visible capacity, but more spare cells for the controller to work with, which Roman says gives the cards a longer service life and lower latency. The latency point matters most on the photography side, where a burst-shooting a1 II is hammering the card with thousands of small writes rather than one long video stream. For video shooters, the practical takeaway is simple: a 1.6TB card is a 2TB-class card with a bigger safety margin baked in.

The 200GB model is the entry point and sits in the AV PRO SE tier with VPG200 certification, aimed at Sony Alpha hybrid shooters; the three larger capacities are the AV PRO cards with the VPG400 and VPG800 certifications discussed above.

“The last three years were the anomaly”

Roman was one of the first people to warn us, well before IBC last year, that a storage crisis was coming. We wrote about it when it hit, Sony subsequently pulled nearly its entire memory card lineup, and Johnnie had a longer conversation with Roman at CP+ about the AI-driven demand behind it. So I asked him: what actually happened, and where does it go from here?

His framing flips the usual complaint on its head. The problem is not that prices are high now; it is that prices over the last three years were extraordinarily low. During COVID, the industry overbuilt NAND and DRAM capacity, demand never materialized at that scale, and at some point manufacturers were selling flash well below their own production cost purely to convert stock back into working capital. Filmmakers got used to that, and it was never sustainable.

What we are heading back to, in Roman’s view, is where the market sat for roughly a decade before that: 50, 60, 70 cents per gigabyte. When he founded Angelbird 18 years ago, it was a dollar per gigabyte. Meanwhile, the enormous demand coming from AI infrastructure has to be served somehow, and serving it means new fabs and new process technology, all of which somebody has to pay for. The current price, he said, is simply what it costs.

Sold out until 2030

The part that should worry anyone planning a large production is allocation. According to Roman, the output of the fabs is already sold and allocated years in advance, into 2029 and 2030. A new fab takes about five years from decision to productive output, so nothing coming online soon changes that picture. If you order flash today, you receive it toward the end of 2027, and you pay today’s price for it.

That reshapes how a company like Angelbird has to operate. They used to forecast two to three years out; they now plan five years ahead, and they locked in their allocations two years ago. Roman says that leaves them safe for their existing customers and for their planned growth. But if someone walked in tomorrow wanting 500,000 units, the honest answer would be no. The old logic, where a spike in demand let you negotiate a better price, no longer applies; there are buyers who would pay anything for the same wafers.

This is also why the effects are showing up far beyond memory cards. We have heard from smaller camera and accessory makers who had confirmed component orders (a batch of fans, in one case) cancelled because the supplier could get more money from an AI customer, and the recent price increases from smartphone and computer manufacturers, including Apple, are part of the same picture.

Should you buy storage now?

I put the practical question to him directly: if I have a big project next year and need a lot of media, do I buy it today, regardless of brand? Roman’s advice came in two parts, and he was careful to label it as his personal view.

First, he expects the price where it is now to be stable for the next one to two years. There may be a slight downtrend toward the end of 2027, but he would put it at two or three percent, maybe five at most. Nobody should be waiting for prices to halve. Second, if you have a project, plan it properly and buy the media when you need it. If you happen to have spare cash, buy as much as you can, because the next problem after price will be availability, and availability, as he put it, is key right now.

He also had a word on the daily deals some retailers are still running on storage. From his perspective, it makes no sense to dump stock cheaply right now, because having product on the shelf is the whole game; if you sell it below market, you have to buy it back at a higher price. Some retailers with two or three leftover units bought at yesterday’s cost will still do it, though. His advice to end users is to make sure a suspiciously cheap card is an original and not a counterfeit, and then buy it, because you will not see that price again.

Price and availability

Roman did not have retail pricing to hand on the show floor and pointed me to Angelbird’s website and its dealers, saying only that the company had worked to keep the cards competitive. The prices from the launch are $399.99 / €361.26 for the 400GB AV PRO CFexpress Type A v4, $599 / €756.22 for the 800GB card, and $899.99 / €1008.32 for the 1.6TB version. The 200GB AV PRO SE CFexpress Type A v4 is $199 / €226.81.

Availability is, in Roman’s words, prompt: the cards are shipping now through all Angelbird channels and partners, and directly from the company’s website. Every card comes with Angelbird’s three-year limited warranty and in-house data recovery service, provided you register it within 30 days of purchase.

For more information, please visit the Angelbird website.

Has the memory price situation already changed how you plan a shoot, and are you buying media ahead of projects or waiting it out? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!