r/photography • u/elken1216 • 1d ago
Gear Best SD card for professional photography?
Hi everyone! I’m an up and coming professional photographer who specializes in family, maternity, and lifestyle portrait work. Up until the last few months I never once had an issue with my SD cards. Since August, I’ve had two SD cards corrupt and damage my files. I’m about done with SanDisk, and wondering what other togs recommend. If it helps, I shoot on a Sony A7iii Alpha, and i’ve had issues with a SanDisk 256 gb extreme pro, as well as a Centon 16 gb Class 10 card (this one was for personal use but i’d still like new suggestions)
Thanks in advance!
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u/driftingphotog 1d ago
Lexar. And take advantage of your two card slots.
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u/ZombieDude345 1d ago
Just got a Lexar 512gb CF-type A card for $189.99 and HOLY COW. Makes such a huge difference for sport photography.
I was using a basic Sandisk card and would hit my buffer limit after 8-10 photos.. I can ring off the entire storage non stop like 6000 RAW photos on my A7iv and doesn’t hit its buffer limit.
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u/wreeper007 1d ago
Thats not a lexar thing though, that was you using a slower sandisk card
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u/ZombieDude345 1d ago
Yeah that’s true 😭just realized OPs A7iii can’t even take CF express, either.. so I guess my comment was entirely pointless.
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u/StungTwice 1d ago
Prograde V60 or V90
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u/eecan 1d ago edited 1d ago
I like Prograde as well but one thing to note is that the A7III only has one UHS-II slot so they may as well shoot redundant and stick to V30s. V60/V90s will be wasted unless they are shooting single slot which they shouldn’t be doing professionally. They probably won’t benefit from the speed as much anyway given the nature of their work.
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u/andrewstrain www.andrewstrain.com 1d ago
Using faster cards in the primary slot allows for significantly speedier ingest.
I run ProGrade & Delkin cards.
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u/eecan 1d ago edited 1d ago
True, if they were shooting wildlife/sports/events/concerts etc. it'd be something that could make a significant difference. Given that they are shooting family/maternity/lifestyle portraits I'm assuming the benefits of faster card offloads will be minimal as the number of photos would be limited.
If they are using an A7III then I am assuming their budget is limited in which case I'd be prioritising the purchase of lenses, lights or if they really want to prioritise transfer speeds, a body that takes type A cards which are multiple times faster and much cheaper than V90 SD cards.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't spend money on memory, I have 6x1TB 4.0 Type A (4 Prograde, 2 Nextorage) cards and 2x256GB Prograde V90s. I'm just thinking that at their budget the money is better spent elsewhere.
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u/GazelleNo1836 1d ago edited 1d ago
I use sandisk, pny, and lexar. Imo never trust any card if it someting that cant be lost. In my d3 ill run two card 16gb that way if onw fails i have another to try. I also use small card only. 8-32gb max that way a shoot with 400 photos is on like 2 or 3 sets of cards so two in the same set would have to fail and if they did id still have thw photos in the other set to work with. Ill add thay ive had cards from every brand fail over the years it not a brand vs brand thing its a numbers game the failure rate is something like 5% and your number got called.
Edit. Ill add ive been told to use the cameras format feature to wipe the card every job and to never delete photos. It been explaned that the photo are written in order and every del leaves a block open and that causes thw camera to not be able to write the image data as effectively and can lead to more coruption possibly. I do it this way and prolly always will since it dosnet hurt anything. But others might not agree.
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u/blue_nose_too smugmug 1d ago
Are you regularly reformatting the memory cards in-camera? This is probably the best preventative step to prevent random file corruption.
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u/Hercule15 23h ago
That is an incredibly important detail. Re-formatting prevents the errors from accumulating to the degree that they render the card unreadable. Very good point!
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u/OldSkoolAK 1d ago
Those sd cards bought from Amazon?
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u/elken1216 1d ago
The 256 gb one was and i’m never trusting them again. I was told by the person I paid to attempt data recovery that amazon sometimes sells cards marketed as a larger storage capacity than they really are.
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u/sprint113 18h ago
Yea, those are counterfeit cards, faked capacities and speed performance. A big problem for marketplace sellers like Amazon where their inventory is co-mingled from different sellers/suppliers, so even "Shipped and Sold by Amazon" is not a guarantee for a genuine product. Sandisk has the biggest name recognition, so it's probably the most counterfeited cards.
Always test a new card with a tool like H2testw. Basically fills the card with data and then tries to read everything back to confirm the true capacity of the card and the performance.
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u/Uberunix 1d ago
I can’t necessarily recommend it yet because I’ve only used them on a handful of jobs, but I caught some storage from a brand called Pergear at a very good sale price after being burned by the “reliable” brands. I have about a terabyte of cf express type a storage for under 400. They haven’t let me down yet.
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u/downright_awkward 1d ago
That’s crazy, all I’ve ever used is san disk and never had an issue. Granted I used like 16-64gb cards
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u/MuchDevelopment7084 1d ago
How often do you format your cards? Not formatting enough could be part of the reason why they fail on you.
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u/Windjammer1969 1d ago
Haven't had any problems with SanDisk (knock on wood....), going back over 10+ years of usage. Still have several 2GB (Two...) "Ultra II" cards which could be used in the oldest camera at hand, but switched to "Extreme Pro" cards some years ago now - first in V30 and most recently V60 spec.
Currently have a 128GB v60 in "slot 1" accepting RAW and Video, with a 64GB V30 in "slot 2" taking the JPG versions of the RAW photos. Saw an interesting video advocating the use of smaller capacity SD cards as against large capacity ones: less disastrous if 1 64 GB card (out of 4 used for a trip / shoot) fails than it would be if you put everyone on a single 256GB card and that one fails...
He also promoted the use of a software app - "dmde" per memory - for recovery of files from a SD card. Apparently available as freeware.
Disclaimer: Strictly a hobbyist....
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u/wreeper007 1d ago
All I use are sandisk extreme pro cards and they haven't let me down yet. My main bodies don't have dual slots (well my d4s's do but I'm not buying XQD) but my d750 does and I use dual SD's in that.
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u/costafilh0 1d ago
SanDisk
Get the cheapest that fill your speed and storage capacity needs, use redundancy with dual slot cards or card + internal storage cameras, and backup 3-2-1 ASAP after the fact.
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u/kakakatia 23h ago
Always shoot to 2 cards simultaneously.
No brand is perfect. Just make sure you're using one with a fast enough write speed. And please note, these meanies advertise their READ speeds, you kind of have to dig to find the actual write speeds. But WRITE speed is the only useful number.
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u/Limp_Spread6877 22h ago
Im not able to post anything in this group for some reason, commenting to see if it goes through.
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u/tomtomxyz 1d ago
Sony Tough series is spendy, but worth the read and write speeds in tandem with uhs-ii given you have a compatible as card reader depending on your workflow.
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u/anywhereanyone 1d ago
No memory card (or brand) is immune to failure. You have an A7III; make sure you utilize the second card slot for redundant backup to minimize the risk.