Accessories: 4 out of 5
Lifetime warranty, actually useful software, and usual clamshell card holder. There really is not much to complain about on this side of things.
Read performance: 25 out 25
The read performance that CFAST 2.0 cards like the Lexar 3400X have to offer are simply insane. You literally will have to have a high end Solid State Drive to keep up with this beast. Put another way you can copy the contents of this 32GB card in under 6.3 seconds. That is what we call fast!
Write performance: 38 out of 40
While there is no denying that there is plenty of room for improvement on the write side of the equation compared to the read….it is hard to get too upset with 270MB/s performance levels. After all that is 180% faster than what the fastest CompactFlash card offers….now if only camera manufactures would get onboard so that more than 4K movie camera owners could take advantage of that speed!
Warranty: 9 out of 10
Just as with the 1066X CompactFlash Professional series, the Lexar 3400X Professional comes with a lifetime warranty that is backstopped by one of the largest NAND manufactures in the world: Micron. This means that the Lexar Professional 1066’s lifetime warranty is indeed a true lifetime warranty and will be honored for your lifetime and not the cards! The only minor issue is RMA’ing one may mean shipping it to the States. If you have a Micron RMA depot in your country then you can consider this card a perfect 10.
Value: 15 out of 20
While the Lexar 3400x series costs about twice per Gigabyte of what the Lexar1066X CompactFlash series costs, you do get a lot more performance for your money. Mix in a lifetime warranty and good software and while the 3400X is not as good a value as the 1066X series it still is not too shabby in this department either.
Final Score: 95 / 100
The Lexar 3400X is a great glimpse of what is to come in the near future to high end DSLR cameras; however, this new standard is a double edged sword. On the one hand it will offer performance that is unmatched by CompactFlash cards; sadly all this performance does come with a rather steep premium. For basically the same amount of your hard earned you will only get half the capacity of what you would with CompactFlash – ie 32GB instead of 64GB. Of course on the other hand you get a heck of a lot more performance so it really will come down to what you value most: capacity or performance.
