Lexar Professional 1800x Gold Series R280/W205 256GB, UHS-II U3, Class 10

Lexar’s newest SD card is a solid entry to their already extensive portfolio of portable memory cards. The Lexar Professional 1800x GOLD Series more than meets the requirements of creative professionals who work with high-quality 4K video and burst image capture, and where speed, quality, and sustained reliability are paramount. Though results in our benchmarking showed numbers just under Lexar’s quoted transfer speeds, the 2MB large block sequential numbers were still impressive, posting 252.6MB/s read and 175.3MB/s write. The Black Magic test showed more moderate results, however, with 204.2MB/s read (roughly 21% slower) and 104.5MB/s write (roughly 50% slower). As far as durability goes, you can’t really beat Lexar’s lifetime warranty (which is even better than Samsung’s 10-year warranty), giving a peace of mind that your card will last as long as your camera. It is also specced to handle the lifestyle of pretty much professional or consumer, including being roughed around a bit in your bag and in the outdoors with the elements. These reliability features also include water-proof, temperature-proof, shockproof, vibration-proof, and X-ray-proof ratings. The 1800x GOLD Series is reasonably priced for a high-end professional SD card as well, going for roughly $100 for the highest capacity model (256GB). To compare to a high-end competitor in the 2000x class, the SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO SDXC 128GB model is currently going for $170 on Amazon, and is faster than the 1800x Lexar in writes. The 1800x GOLD though delivers a really nice mix of price/performance and capacity. Lexar of course offers the 2000x card as well which comes in around $130 for the 128GB capacity and $225 for the 256GB which is a major price advantage over the SanDisk. Samsung doesn’t offer a card in this category. Ultimately, if you’re a creative professional who is serious about having a high-quality card in your camera, or if you’re simply a consumer looking for a top-end SD card for your compatible device, we certainly recommend the Lexar 1800x GOLD Series. That said, if you want the best possible performance, the company’s next step up is their top-end 2000x GOLD Series, which will give you a potential increase of 30MB/s in reads and 100MB/s in writes.