I've just made the jump back to Nikon (fell off the wagon for a bit, but I got better!), and I'm wondering what SDHC cards are generally recommended for use with the D7000.
In Canon-land Sandisk is king, but I used to run Lexar in my Nikon D70. Anyone have a preference?
I've been using an old (at least 4 year old) random Kingston 2GB SD card in my D7000, and it's performance has suprised me! It can handle bursts of 6 RAW shots before it buffers (i'm assuming that's the built in buffer's max?), and can record video without stopping... Very interesting.
I loan out cards likes crazy, people "lose" them and I end up replacing them with whatever the best SanDisk 8GB priced around $30 is when I stumble into Best Buy once or twice a year. I used 30MB/sec during all of 2010 with my D90 and eventually D7000 (both slots), then 45MB/sec with 30 MB/sec backup from early 2011to a little after Thanksgiving when I bought 90MB/sec and moved the 45MB/sec to back. So now both my D7000's have 90MB with 45MB back, but whenever I stop into somewhere that has SanDisk cards next they'll probably have 120MB/sec ones or something for an absurdly low price and might grab them if I feel like standing in line.
I just bought 10 sheets of 4x5 film for $30 that will last me a few weeks at most, so I don't mind keeping my digital film that will last me 8-10 months of primary use and another 8-10 as a backup up to date when it costs the same. I do swap my cards a lot though, constantly in and out of my camera and Mac, so refreshing my cards is probably a good thing.
With the cost of cards as of today... I installed 2x64GB Sandisk cards on my D7000 and I never, never needed more space during a day. I keep a "modest" 16GB card as a backup but never used it. But I do not do video.
Card brand don't worry about too much. If you care at all about continuous performance, make sure you get at least a 30MB/s card. Any slower and your card is holding camera performance back.
Just a heads up if you choose the SanDisk Extreme 16GB cards (which are wonderful a B&H is a good source.) Make sure you update the firmware of your D7000. The updates can be downloaded to any SDHC card via tha Nikon Support website, but if you don't update the B Firmware to 1.02 you may have issues with the cards not performing properly and actually causing very odd things to happen with the D7000 -- including not being able to turn the camera off. It's a 5 minute fix, but one you should do BEFORE you pop the SanDisk extreme 16GB cards in the camera. Not a single issue for me after the update, but weird stuff going on BEFORE I fixed it.
