Micron Discontinuing Lexar Removable Storage Retail Business

[mahdi_mak2000]

I always think of lexar as premium brand mostly for professionals.

not sure why they did it, I believe it was profitable.

 

[deleteme]

While I don't wish Lexar ill, I would observe that they and SanDisk are the only brands that have failed multiple times for me.
Lexar has fed me three bum cards and SanDisk two.
Every other brand I have used has not failed.

They made me think that the premium paid for their cards was directed to their marketing to convince me of their excellence rather than actually ensuring their QC.

 

[pwp]

Harry Hindsight told me just three days ago to buy Sandisk stocks.

Sandisk will be laughing all the way to the bank over this. Like many others, I have a mix of high spec Lexar and Sandisk CF & SD cards. All photographers have benefited from the Lexar/Sandisk competition. We may see slower development and creeping prices now.

A market shakeup like this creates great opportunities for the smaller players. If the Lexar brand is sold, you'd want to wait a few years to check out the new owners QC credentials.

-pw

 

[AvTvM]

i dont see negative effects for *Canon* customers. sandisk will not be sole supplier. fully expect samsung to use this opportunity and push their flash card business.

only xqd cards seem to currently come as lexar or sony only ... so people will now be at the mercy of sony ... hehe, hi-end Nikonians.

CFast cards however are available from sandisk, transcend, adata and other labels as well, so no problem for hi-end Canon users.

unless samsung and/or adata or transcend enter xqd market, this could well mean its over for xqd format.

personally i have made sure to avoid xqd as much as sony memory stick cards in the old days ... i do hope for total standardization on micro-sd.. card format. UHS III is plenty fast, if camera makers are to funally support it in their products.

 

[CropFactor]

Harry Hindsight told me just three days ago to buy Sandisk stocks.

Sandisk will be laughing all the way to the bank over this. Like many others, I have a mix of high spec Lexar and Sandisk CF & SD cards. All photographers have benefited from the Lexar/Sandisk competition. We may see slower development and creeping prices now.

A market shakeup like this creates great opportunities for the smaller players. If the Lexar brand is sold, you'd want to wait a few years to check out the new owners QC credentials.

-pw

SanDisk is owned by Western Digital. I won't be surprised if WD acquire Lexar and run it as a competing brand, same as what WD did when they acquired HGST.

 

[Luds34]

i dont see negative effects for *Canon* customers. sandisk will not be sole supplier. fully expect samsung to use this opportunity and push their flash card business.

Are Samsung cards any good? Do they make full size SD cards? In a pinch recently I grabbed a 32 gig Samsung Evo Select micro SD card. It's U1 speed rated. The marketing even says, "fast enough for burst speed photography" and it can record 1080p video, has an 80 M/s icon. But I found it performing like a dog in one of my Fuji's. The write time was very slow. I'd fire a shot, and hit play to view the file and at times the delay was quite long.

 

[tron]

i dont see negative effects for *Canon* customers. sandisk will not be sole supplier. fully expect samsung to use this opportunity and push their flash card business.

Are Samsung cards any good? Do they make full size SD cards? In a pinch recently I grabbed a 32 gig Samsung Evo Select micro SD card. It's U1 speed rated. The marketing even says, "fast enough for burst speed photography" and it can record 1080p video, has an 80 M/s icon. But I found it performing like a dog in one of my Fuji's. The write time was very slow. I'd fire a shot, and hit play to view the file and at times the delay was quite long.

I got a samsung pro+ sd card to get write speed close to sandisk extreme pro. I guess all other card types from samsung will be slower... I do not know how much slower but you should do some searching (there are for example evo plus cards)

 

[magarity]

I used to use Sandisk products until their own update to my MP3 player bricked it and they wanted more than it cost originally to fix it.
Samsung makes excellent chips and their flash drives from SSD to SD are all top shelf.

 

[mnclayshooter]

And with the general tone of respondents on this thread, it's not hard to see why they are shuttering/selling it off.


Virtually every comment on this thread says "I use Sandisk, but I think Lexar is good". Sandisk is getting the money, Lexar is getting some strong atta-boys.


Lol. I have no axe to bear, I just thought it was funny this morning reading this.

 

[AvTvM]

for a long time Lexar prices were quite a bit higher than Sandisk (not to even mention Transcend and other brands). I guess - since I dont have numbers - Lexar has/had a good share with "Pro's", but not with "amateurs/enthusiasts" and even less so with price-sensitive "consumers".

More recently, Lexar products looked to be priced more competitively. But the "premium price" impression probably lasted in many potential buyers minds ...

 

[Luds34]

I used to use Sandisk products until their own update to my MP3 player bricked it and they wanted more than it cost originally to fix it.
Samsung makes excellent chips and their flash drives from SSD to SD are all top shelf.

Their SSDs seem to perform pretty solid. Sometimes I think that is more the controller then the memory itself and my understanding is Samsung does their own controllers and they are top notch. Their wear level seems to be pretty awesome (especially on their pro SSDs) but I think most SSDs today will long outlast normal desktop usage.

I'm not sold on their SD cards. Besides this card performing slowly, below it's rating, I've also had a Samsung card just fail on me recently as well. It was a 64 gig card in a tablet doing little more then storing some movies and music and it went kaputt on me. I replaced it with a Sandisk.

 

[LDS]

SanDisk is owned by Western Digital. I won't be surprised if WD acquire Lexar and run it as a competing brand, same as what WD did when they acquired HGST.

That was only because of trade regulators rules: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/mofcom_says_yes_wd_hgst_merger/

WD is already trying to buy Toshiba chip business, I can't see it going after Lexar when it already own SanDisk.

Anyway my reason to buy Lexar was it was a Micron brand, and Micron is one of leaders in this kind of products. If it just becomes a brand slapped on memory chips you don't know where they come from, I see very little value.

 

[csista]

That's a shame. I'm practically exclusive to Lexar. Nothing against Sandisk, just that Lexar was always as reliable, but usually priced cheaper. Hopefully there's at least a big blowout sale before the end. If I can get a 256GB 1066x in each slot of my second 5d4 to match the first, I won't have to worry about new cards for a long time.

 

[Dylan777]

Wow...this is sad news.

All my cards are Lexar. :'(

 

[ethanz]

Should I assume if a 64gb Lexar CF card is back ordered at BH that it won't come at all?

 

[tron]

Wow...this is sad news.

All my cards are Lexar. :'(

I am sure your cards will continue to work great (but I understand that you wrote this mainly because you were a satisfied Lexar customer and wished to continue being one...)