Even as a photography and tech journalist, I can't pretend that even the best memory card readers are the most exciting devices. Prograde Digital's PG05.6 CFexpress Type B reader is rather more special than your average card reader though. It may look pedestrian, but this is one of an extremely rare breed of readers to use the cutting-edge USB4 interface. This gives it the potential to be 4x faster than a typical CFexpress type B reader based around USB 3.2 Gen 2 technology, and therefore this could also be the fastest memory card reader in the world.
Part of my indifference towards the humble card reader is that most tend to offer essentially the same performance, being based around the now ubiquitous USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface. This means they'll all be capable of a theoretical 10Gbps transfer speed - or around 800-900MB/s in the real world. For an SD card reader, that's perfectly sufficient, but when it comes to CFexpress Type B, 800-900MB/s just isn't enough. Even the 'slowest' Type B cards are capable of over 1200MB/s, meaning a USB 3.2 Gen 2 CFexpress reader will noticeably bottleneck a Type B card.
