Memory Cards

Why are memory cards important? When you are shooting landscape images speed isn’t important because scenes are pretty static and you are shooting single images or low frames/sec (fps). However, with faster moving wildlife the combination of your cameras buffer size and the memory card read/write speeds can be pretty important when your are shooting high fps and long bursts of shots. If you are shooting high fps long burst rates with a small buffer, your camera buffer will fill up and the actual fps will be limited by the read/write speeds of your slowest memory card. Birds in flight (BIF) are an example of high fps and long burst rates. I normally shoot BIF at 10-12 fps and this can last for several seconds. My Nikon D5 has two XQD card slots and a very large buffer, my actual fps never slows down. Cameras with two memory card slots are limited by the card slot with the slowest memory card. Shooting high fps for multiple seconds can be a problem when shooting cameras with smaller buffers and slower memory cards. My D500 and D850 are examples of cameras with smaller buffers and their second card slot uses an SD card. SD cards come in a variety of speeds. SDXC is the fastest. None of the SD type cards can keep up with the XQD cards, not even close when shooting long bursts. When speed is really important, I remove my SDXC cards so they don’t limit the camera. I give up the redundancy of 2nd card backup. By the way, I normally use a card in the second slot that is at least twice the capacity of the primary card slot.

My Nikon cameras use CF express and XQD cards which have great transfer speeds. All my Z9 cameras have two cards slots. CF express cards using PCIe Gen technology succeeded XQD, CF and CFast memory cards as the new standard for high speed cards. CF express cards have a read speed of 1700MB/sec and write speeds of 1480MB/sec. The CF express cards are the same size, shape and connector as the XQD card format.

My current memory cards.

  • Sony 256GB CF Express Card

  • Lexar Professional 2933X XQD 64 GB Card

  • Lexar Professional 2933X XQD 32 GB Card

  • Sony XQD G Series 32 GB

  • SanDisk Extreme Pro 300 mbs SDXC UHS-II U3 64 GB (for the Nikon D850 and D500)