greatest memory card

[geesbert]

What is the current king of the hill, state of the art, bestest ever SD-card?

For years I always bought sandisk professional, they never failed me and survived even washing and tumble drying at full heat, but startup time especially with the Leica m240 made me switch to lexar professional. they are really fast, but not as reliable as the sandisk ones. all of 3 I got 2 years ago now are goners. the plastic bfins broke off and two of them make my cameras stop working. I get a new set of cards every 2 years, so now I am looking for new ones.

I prefer cards in the 16 to 32GB size, I rather buy a few, I like to spread my risk.

I shoot a lot of pictures, it is not uncommon to rip through 1000 or more pictures a day, so I need speed.

What do you use and why?

[dwswager]

In the general commercial cards (discounting military/industrial rugged cards), I would say the Sandisk Extreme Pro 95mb/s cards for SD and the Lexar Professional 1066X Compact Flash Cards.

[SZRitter]

Depending on your camera, buying the latest and greatest may be a complete waste of money. If the bus speeds on the camera are too slow, the camera itself will be the bottleneck. So I would recommend either mentioning what camera(s) these cards will be used with, or looking up the camera's specs and seeing what the highest rated card it can use is.

[geesbert]

That will be:

Leica M 240
Canon 5d Mark 3
Sony A7r
Olympus OMD EM1


Especially with the Leica it sems to make a big difference in operational speed.

[Phil Indeblanc]

I have used Kensington, Transcend, rvrn Monster brand recently, as I have Sandisk and Lexar. I have had a Lexar fail and Transcend fail, and they all can fail.  These all are perfectly fine. I've been shooting with them ever since the Nikon D40-D70, and remeber then switching to the 10D Canon.

I'm under the impression that not a bunch of companies make these, yet brand them to specs the brands request.

Most impoirtant thing for me is that the specs are there. If the specs meet the claim, and it is a brand name with Life Time watrranty, I buy it. So far the Transcend, Monster and Kensigton in 2-3 cameras have been perfectly fine. Only time I had an issue was when I swapped a card between a 1D series to a 5D, and it corrupted the card and most images. That was a Sandisk. The card was not at fault, as the 2 cams write different types of raw files.  I have dents and even got the cards wet at times, and dropped them a bunch of times.

The 32GB transcendand Monster UDMA 7,6 500x were around years ago $50. life time warranty.

[stevebri]

It's an interesting question, you could say theist card is the one you have right now...

I looked at the various sites that tested cards for my camera (D810) and to be honest I don't own or have ever used a top spec card, instead I use the same cards I used when shooting MF, that is Sandisk Extreme cards, 4GB,8GB and the odd 16GB, I still have all the CF's I bought 8-9 yrs ago plus newer SD's they run about 60mb/s and that is fine for me, I don't shoot sport or max out fps.

I must say I have (touch wood) never had a card fail on me, the worst I had was an SD card lose it's lock slider so it cannot be overwritten, that's not a bad advert for Sandisk I suppose.

What was/is important to me is reducing risk, so that means rotating cards frequently, storing cards properly and using smaller cards, thus if I lose a card I haven't lost a whole shoot.

So best card as the OP asked might just be the one you have right now that works.


Steve

[Eric Brody]

I do not make huge numbers of images when I go out. I've had the best luck with Sandisk as a brand. The only times I've had a card electronically fail was a Sandisk many years ago in the D200 era. I recently had a Lexar physically fail as the little ribs broke somehow, and I do not consider myself rough on cards. It was replaced by Lexar. I started in digital photography with CF cards and lived in constant fear of bending the camera pins with a clumsy insertion. Even now when I use my D800E I never remove the CF card, only the SD in a probably overly compulsive attempt to limit any damage.

My question for the OP is why he gets new cards every two years? I've never heard of such a practice and would like to hear his reasons. I've heard of people replacing hard drives regularly BEFORE they fail and with improving technology but never camera cards.

Thanks.
Eric

[dwswager]

NAND flash does have a limited life cycle.  You should reformat the card in camera instead of deleting the images from from the card.  I download using a transcend USB3 card reader and then reformat the card in camera after every download.  I've washed and dried a CF card before in a pair of jean no problem.  If designed appropriately, there should be no worries bending CF pins.  Only in the cheapo computer readers where it is possible to insert the card wrong is that a worry.

As to why you might upgrade is size, speed and wear.  I have a whole stack of CF that I should have sold or given away: 8MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 1GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB....   I currently use 32GB Lexar 1066x cards in my D810 w/ a Lexar 600x SD card.  In the D7100 I have 2 Sandisk Extreme Pro 95mbps cards in 32GB.

[geesbert]

I do not make huge numbers of images when I go out. I've had the best luck with Sandisk as a brand. The only times I've had a card electronically fail was a Sandisk many years ago in the D200 era. I recently had a Lexar physically fail as the little ribs broke somehow, and I do not consider myself rough on cards. It was replaced by Lexar. I started in digital photography with CF cards and lived in constant fear of bending the camera pins with a clumsy insertion. Even now when I use my D800E I never remove the CF card, only the SD in a probably overly compulsive attempt to limit any damage.

My question for the OP is why he gets new cards every two years? I've never heard of such a practice and would like to hear his reasons. I've heard of people replacing hard drives regularly BEFORE they fail and with improving technology but never camera cards.

Thanks.
Eric

Rather safe than sorry!

it is probably a bit paranoid, but spending 1-200€ every two years for new cards is giving me a rather cheap peace of mind, considering the masses of picture we are shooting. I always format my cards in camera.

[Colorado David]

I have a friend, now retired, who is a Brooks Institute educated photographer.  I've known this guy for years and he's a wealth of knowledge.  He retired from commercial photography rather than switch to digital.  He has Nikon F5 bodies, 2 4x5 view cameras, an 8x10 view camera and 3 Hasselblads.  We were visiting about digital workflow one day and he asked me how much the cards cost.  I told him and he replied, "why would you ever reuse them? Why wouldn't you just store them in the job file?"  He was comparing the cost of the cards with the cost of film and processing and came to that conclusion.  If you'd shot film for your entire career and film and processing costs were always a part of your business model, it's easy to see why he'd think that way.

[dwswager]

I have a friend, now retired, who is a Brooks Institute educated photographer.  I've known this guy for years and he's a wealth of knowledge.  He retired from commercial photography rather than switch to digital.  He has Nikon F5 bodies, 2 4x5 view cameras, an 8x10 view camera and 3 Hasselblads.  We were visiting about digital workflow one day and he asked me how much the cards cost.  I told him and he replied, "why would you ever reuse them? Why wouldn't you just store them in the job file?"  He was comparing the cost of the cards with the cost of film and processing and came to that conclusion.  If you'd shot film for your entire career and film and processing costs were always a part of your business model, it's easy to see why he'd think that way.

Maybe he wouldn't have quit if he knew that the cost was in the camera and not film/processing like the old days.  Interesting how people get locked into one paradigm and can't break free.  Why I loved Ansel Adams.  He saw digital coming and only regretted he wouldn't be there to enjoy the benefits.

Flash cards have about a 10 year archival life when not in use.  That is on average, that the data will be retained on the card for approximately 10 years if you pull it from use and store it.  Various cards have various MTBF ratings for reuse.  Better cards (not necessarily price based) have better ratings for MTBF, shock and temperature, but unused cards all loose their data at about the same rate when not refreshed. Not sure what "up to" means in the following.

SanDisk Memory Vault's "preserve-only" mode

What does "preserve-only" mode mean on the SanDisk Memory Vault drive?
Preserve-only mode means that users can access, view and offload their photos however many times they want, but they cannot write or rewrite new data to the drive.

The drive enters preserve-only mode to insure the SanDisk Memory Vault storage integrity for up to 100 years. In order to have quantifiable data to show how SanDisk Memory Vault technology can support 100 year data retention, accelerated temperature cycling and the Arrhenius acceleration factor was used to simulate the effects to data retention over long durations of memory usage.

[figure1a]

Here's a test/comparison article that says the Lexar Professional 2000x SDHC/SDXC UHS-II - 32GB is the best/fastest at 300MB/s (2000x):

http://www.nine-volt.com/cf-vs-sd-cards-which-is-faster-youll-be-surprised/

[dwswager]

Here's a test/comparison article that says the Lexar Professional 2000x SDHC/SDXC UHS-II - 32GB is the best/fastest at 300MB/s (2000x):

http://www.nine-volt.com/cf-vs-sd-cards-which-is-faster-youll-be-surprised/

As the article states, though, you need a device that is UHS-II equipped and capable.  No current DSLRs to my knowledge meet that requirement.  The real important spec is not throughput or reads, but writes.  How quickly does the buffer of the camera flush to the card and free up the camera.  At present, CF is still faster than SD in a UHS-I equipped camera.  And personally, I like the CF form factor better.  They are more durable and less likely for me to lose!  I do like the price of SD better, however.

[dwswager]

Can't remember if I made this point, but besides the physical differences and the type of contacts, CompactFlash and SecureDigital differ in 1 significant way:  the onboard controller on a CompactFlash card is much more fully featured than that on a SD card.

What this means in the real world is that as long as a device is made to the CFI or CFII specification, any CFI or CFII will work in that device.  Because SD does not have an onboard controller, the device must already know details about the SD in advance.  Hence, if a device is made at the time 2GB SD cards are available, the device will not operate with a 16GB device because it won't know these actually exist.  (normal rules of the format type limitations with FAT, FAT32 or exFAT still apply however).

This is why a 32GB SD card will not work in an old Camera or cell phone and in the camera or cell phone specifications it will list the largest size the device can take.   For example, I have a Samsung Galaxy Note II and it is limited to 64GB (micro) SD while the Galaxy Note 4 can use a 128GB microSD card.

This is also one reason SmartMedia died...it was stupid.  The sizes increased on about a 4-6 month cycle and people were pissed that a 1 year old device might be limited to 8MB while 256MB cards were available.

[Ellis Vener]

I haven't tried them and do not know if it's real or hype but Hoodman Steel is supposedly extremely good: http://hoodmanusa.com/cgi/commerce.cgi?search=action&category=0000

I do use the Hoodman Steel USB 3.0 UDMA Reader  for CF and SD media and i's the best I have used. The other media reader brands I've used include Sandisk, Lexar, Kensington and a couple of generic readers).

[dwswager]

I haven't tried them and do not know if it's real or hype but Hoodman Steel is supposedly extremely good: http://hoodmanusa.com/cgi/commerce.cgi?search=action&category=0000

I do use the Hoodman Steel USB 3.0 UDMA Reader  for CF and SD media and i's the best I have used. The other media reader brands I've used include Sandisk, Lexar, Kensington and a couple of generic readers).

I use the $12 Transcend external reader for both CF and SD.

Reader CF Speed Chart
Reader SD Speed Chart