Transcend also make good SD cards but I would not venture out of those 2 companies myself.
The Nikon D600 has a dual card slot, does it not (Canon shooter here)? In that case, I would personally get a 32/16GB for Raw and 8/4 GB for JPEG depending on how much you shoot and if that camera can assign Raw and JPEG storage to individual cards.
vsg28 wrote:
Can't go wrong with Sandisk and their Extreme Pro (95 MB/s) range.
I got one for my Fuji X10 and it really transforms the responsiveness of the camera compared to the cheap SD cards i have. Don't have a USB3 card reader though, so not able to test how fast it really is.
vsg28 wrote:
Can't go wrong with Sandisk and their Extreme Pro (95 MB/s) range.
Well you would need your device to accept the UHS standard otherwise your never going to see anywhere near that speed .
Example canons 5D3's cf slot can get that sort of speed from its cf slot (with Lexar 1000x cards) but its SD slot tops out at about 20mb/s .
Just having a quick look at prices , here in the uk the extreme pro are about 50% more than more 'normal' class 10 cards
Ian.Dobinson wrote:
Just having a quick look at prices , here in the uk the extreme pro are about 50% more than more 'normal' class 10 cards
Here in the US the price differential is 100%, at least in the SanDisk 64GB SD cards, and as Ian says above the camera should support the UHS-I bus speed or you will not get the throughput. Note that the Transcend SD cards with higher capacities are not UHS compliant.
My SD card collection reflects whatever caught my eye at the moment. The only card that ever failed was a Lexar that I committed cardicide on. I removed it while it was still reading/writing.
peter_n wrote:
Here in the US the price differential is 100%, at least in the SanDisk 64GB SD cards, and as Ian says above the camera should support the UHS-I bus speed or you will not get the throughput. Note that the Transcend SD cards with higher capacities are not UHS compliant.
Does this mean the SDXC will not work at all in the 1 Series or that they just won't operate at maximum speeds?
It would be nice to be able to use 64GB cards in the 1DsmkIII, 1DmmkIV, etc.
Downloading the cards to the computer is where I need the speed.
kdlanejr wrote:
Does this mean the SDXC will not work at all in the 1 Series or that they just won't operate at maximum speeds?
I don't use Canon but if the box the camera came in doesn't have the SDXC symbol on it then it's likely it only supports SDHC. So I think you top out at 32GB as an SDXC card won't work in an SDHC slot. I read somewhere that none of Canon's 1D series of cameras have SDXC support.
Ian.Dobinson wrote:
Well you would need your device to accept the UHS standard otherwise your never going to see anywhere near that speed .
Example canons 5D3's cf slot can get that sort of speed from its cf slot (with Lexar 1000x cards) but its SD slot tops out at about 20mb/s .
Just having a quick look at prices , here in the uk the extreme pro are about 50% more than more 'normal' class 10 cards
Ian.Dobinson - I just spoke with a tech at CPS and was told that the SD slot on the 5DMKIII tops out at 75mb/s. The slot can accept SDHC or SDXC. She also mentioned checking the fine print on the product lit to see the variable bit rate and the constant bit rate. Comparing the two will tell you roughly how high a transfer rate a card can sustain under heavy use.
Aren't SDXC cards supposed to have less latency than SDHC? I thought I read that they do. Throughput for sequential writing might be the same on a camera but opening and closing files as well as initializing the writes I think are supposed to be faster. I dunno by how much tho - 2x maybe? I think that's where most or a lot, of the time is consumed too. It's like creating and opening a file for write access takes 2s and actually writing the data takes like 0.5s. So with SDXC cards that 2s becomes 1s or something and the 0.5s is probably still 0.5s (grr, maybe 0.49s ) - I dunno for sure. A google search will probably turn it up for you.
I'm still using SDHC cards here. I use and like A-Data brand class (10) cards because for GH1 and GH2 hacked video and stills they're have the same speed, reliability, and warrantee as the SanDisk Extreme UHS Class(10) cards and that's all I've needed. The A-Data cards can be found for $20 for a 32gig card and the SanDisk UHS cards are 50 or $60 last I looked.
On size, get the biggest you can afford. Larger memory sizes (denser transistor fields) are faster than smaller ones all other things being equal. If you want to only store 300 images per card you can always change at that point manually but if you're out in the field and need more an 8gig card isn't going to magically grow. Also for time-lapse sequences and/or video it's nice to have plenty of room. If I were buying today I'd opt for 2 or 3 64gb cards myself and when the 128GB SDXC Class (10) cards come down to around $50 or so I'll go for those.
BTW, if you insert an SDXC card into an SDHC device it won't work.
jdlphoto wrote:
Ian.Dobinson - I just spoke with a tech at CPS and was told that the SD slot on the 5DMKIII tops out at 75mb/s. The slot can accept SDHC or SDXC. She also mentioned checking the fine print on the product lit to see the variable bit rate and the constant bit rate. Comparing the two will tell you roughly how high a transfer rate a card can sustain under heavy use.
Well, I find that hard to believe. The SD slot on the 5DMkIII isn't even UHS-1 enabled... These results bear that out...
SDHC and the SDXC should both be the same hardware.
It is the file format that is different. Fat32 vs eXfat.
Regular photography doesn't need SDXC as no photo breaks the 4GB single file limit of SDHC. Video needs SDXC if the camera supports long recording times.
I've never tried by technically you should be able to format the card to either format. Unless they have it locked somehow.
The SD 3.0 (also known as SDXC) specification as you suggest, provides a ceiling of up to 2 TB in the file spec. The SDXC standard however, also includes the modified UHS-I specification (Ultra HighSpeed I), supporting up to 104 MB/s. This is the successor to the High-Speed Bus I/F (Class 10). SDXC is the basis for products that can deliver more serious bandwidth than cards based on the SD 2.0 standard. Of course you'll need USB 3.0 to take advantage of the SD 3.0 potential speed increases tho!
Which cards are fastest currently? I dunno, but this is from Tom's Hardware May 24, 2011...
Also as long as I'm typing, don't dare listen to those brand-nerds who claim Brand X is somehow more reliable than Brand Y because it just isn't so - no matter how many such nerds create long exhaustive web pages saying otherwise. All brands can and do mess up and if you happen to be the 1 in 10,000th person it happens to the only thing that matters are the warrantee terms.
) - I dunno for sure. A google search will probably turn it up for you.
Also for time-lapse sequences and/or video it's nice to have plenty of room. If I were buying today I'd opt for 2 or 3 64gb cards myself and when the 128GB SDXC Class (10) cards come down to around $50 or so I'll go for those. 
