Fastest Memory Card Available Today

For Canon users, this post wont mean much (Yet), but for Nikon and Sony shooters, you may have already been blown away by the speed of the XQD cards by SONY and LEXAR... 

I bought a few XQD cards earlier in the year during my stint of winter wildlife workshops and I was blown away with the write speeds of this memory card... so much so that I went out and bought more... LOL 

Heck, my fourth XQD card just got delivered through Amazon as I write this blog post

And as soon as the D810 replacement comes out, my new D820, or 850, or whatever they call it will have two XQD card slots versus the current combination of one XQD and one SD slot... FYI... for those D5 and D500 users didn't already know... its said that Nikon is offering a full switch to XQD with the D5, and seems to be using the same tactic with the D500. 

As of October of 2016, the latest XQD cards from both LEXAR and Sony had write speed comparisons that looked like this... 

Lexar has up’d the game once again, and has introduced two new cards, which are at least $100 less expensive than Sony’s XQD cards. The Lexar 2933x  is the fastest XQD card in the world. It seems to be a back and forth battle between the two, but here are the quick specs of the new Lexar and Sony cards:

Lexar 1400x 64GB with 210MB/s read and 185MB/s write speed

Lexar 2933x 32GB with 440MB/s read and 400MB/s write speed

Lexar 2933x 64GB with 440MB/s read and 400MB/s write speed (this is what I use)

Lexar 2933x 128GB with 440MB/s read and 400MB/s write speed 

Sony G series 128GB with 400MB/s read and 350MB/s write speed

... and more options being announced all the time. So check with your retailer and see whats in stock now. They are saying that the next version will have write speeds over 500MB/s

All this is great... but in the field, shooting wildlife I was banging off over 170+ RAW and hundreds of JPEG images without the camera buffering. Sure, thats the camera processor as well, but changing cards and using the SD card in the same situation, with the same subject matter I could only manage less than half that before the camera went, "Nope, I need to catch up here". 

Actually, here is a video from Nikon Asia to attest to the memory card comparison... 

I think that pretty much says it all right there... the machine gun test shows 200 images in the first 5 seconds, and hundreds more over a series of bursts

For me it means... less waiting time while my card clears up and more time taking photos... and at the end of the day, thats what matters... being ready when the action happens versus watching it while the buffer clears up.

Kev