The Sony Professional XQD G Series 128 GB is approximately $217and the big daddy 256 GB version is about $440.Ĭlearly though if you’re a professional shooting something that requires you to take full advantage of your high frame rate/fast buffer camera, these high prices are completely justifiable… if a little hard to swallow at first! Since XQD cards are still relatively new, jumping up in storage capacity quickly increases the price. Using a camera with high frame rate and large buffer, you can really take advantage of this. The Sony Professional XQD G Series 64 GB is well-priced at around $110, with an incredible 440 MB/s Read speed and 400 MB/s Write speed. Sony just pip Lexar in cost though, so it’s the Sony offerings that I’ll recommend here as the best XQD cards for photography. Here’s Nikon’s explanation of XQD and why you should consider it.īoth Lexar and Sony make excellent, reliable XQD cards which offer incredible read and write speeds.
If you own a camera that offers XQD memory card support, I’m going to hazard a guess that you’re a professional photographer (or a lucky/wealthy amateur!) As such, you’ll only really be interested in mid-high capacity XQD cards.Ĭameras that support the XQD format currently include the Nikon D500, Nikon D850, Nikon D4/D4s, Nikon D5 – hopefully we’ll be seeing more and more cameras released which support this gold standard in memory card formats soon. Of course, you can always choose to shoot multiple smaller capacity cards, but I don’t recommend this for professionals for the reasons outlined above. Large capacity cards are usually used by wedding photographers, sports photographers, wildlife photographers, or anyone else who needs to shoot thousands of photos a day.
Then there’s the big daddy, the SanDisk Extreme Pro 512 GB SDXC UHS-I – you’ll have to shell out about $280 for one of these. The best options which allow large data storage include the SanDisk Extreme Pro 128 GB SDXC UHS-I which costs around $65 and the SanDisk Extreme Pro 256 GB SDXC UHS-I which costs about $130 – this is what I use for my wedding photography work. If you shoot multiple high resolution photos in succession with cameras such as the Sony a9 II, or Nikon D810, you may want to invest in these larger capacity memory card. The format here is SDXC, with the ‘XC’ referring to their extended capacity. There’s not much point me writing separately about the large capacity best memory cards since they all have similar performance, just at varying sizes.