Lexar is expanding its memory card lineup by introducing new Silver series UHS-II SD and CFexpress cards. While not as large or fast as the Gold or Diamond series, they are adequate for high-resolution photo and video applications.

Lexar’s Silver series is intended to sit between the Diamond and Gold series cards, but it still offers enough performance to appeal to a wide spectrum of shooters.

Lexar’s Diamond and Gold series CFexpress cards both promise up to 1,900 MB/s transfer speeds, but only the Diamond series has the VPG 400 rating, which means the cards will never fall below 400 MB/s write speeds. While several cards can advertise extremely fast transfer rates, most fall short regarding long-term performance. Photographers are less concerned about this, but losing speed during a write results in lost frames during high-resolution, high-framerate video recording.

The new Silver series isn’t VPG 400 approved either, but Lexar claims it can handle 8K video recording thanks to 1,750 MB/s read speeds and up to 1,300 MB/s write speeds. Another point of differentiation is total capacity: while the Gold series offers capacities up to 2 TB, the Silver series is limited to 512GB. Again, this isn’t going to be a significant issue for photographers, but filmmakers should be aware that 512GB won’t hold much 8K video material.

Lexar doesn’t currently make a Diamond series SD card (most likely because SD cards can’t go much faster than the performance found on the Gold series cards), so the Silver series SD cards are definitely more suited to photographers than filmmakers, as they are only V60 and thus don’t promise sustained write speeds above 60 MB/s. However, they can achieve read rates of up to 280 MB/s and write speeds of up to 160 MB/s. Lexar claims it is fast enough for 4K video, although actual performance will vary depending on how data-rich the 4K source is.

The cards come with an excellent warranty, which is unique in the photography industry. The CFexpress cards have a limited lifetime warranty, whereas the SD cards have a 10-year warranty.