CF vs SDHC

<p>I bought a D810 and it is the first camera I have using both cards. I shoot RAW with my D700 and plan to continue...should I be preferring one card over the other?<br>

Thanks<br>

Ray</p>

<p>The fastest CF cards write data faster than the fastest SD cards - but it depends on the technology level of the cards - a new SD may be quicker than an old CF.</p>

<p>It appears that CF is rapidly becoming 'old technology', and inflated prices are reflecting its lack of popularity. SDxx is now the de-facto standard and widely available. I'm not sure there's a huge difference in speed in practice, since there are data bottlenecks elsewhere in both computers and cameras.<br>

Anyway, SD cards certainly offer the best price/performance ratio these days.</p>

<p>FYI Raymond, the D810 takes SDXC cards as well as HC, meaning that you can use >32 Gigabyte capacity. I'm using 64 gig class 10 UHS SDXC cards in a D800 very successfully. They can be got for £30 or so (about $45 US) in speeds up to 90 MB/s - read speed, or a bit more for faster cards. Since it's the write speed that's important for camera use it's worth reading the small print in the specification. Personally I like Samsung's SDXC cards; they have a metal jacket over the plastic core that I think makes them a little more robust. Their price is very competitive too.</p>

<p>BTW, don't be tempted to use Micro-SD cards in an adapter. This makes the cards very unreliable IME.</p>

<p>I just run an SD card in my D800 since that is what all my Mac's take and what my Df uses. Don't really have any other uses for CF cards, dunno, maybe auxiliary storage with a card reader.</p>

<p>CF cards have an on-board controller, whereas SD cards use a controller in the host device. That aside, there seems to be no difference in performance, either in camera or in a card reader, with cards of similar specifications. The cost/GB has come down significantly for SD cards in the last couple of years, below the level of comparable CF cards.</p>

<p>SD cards don't have the potential bending/breaking liability of the small holes and tiny pins of CF connectors. A box which would hold only 4 CF cards will hold 16 SD cards in the same space. Will I ever need 16 32GB cards which hold almost 900 18MP images each? Unlikely, unless I take a three week trip without a laptop.</p>

<p>http://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/nikon-d810/fastest-sd-cf-card-speed-tests/<br>

CF - still faster but also more expensive</p>

<p>The claim that in general, the fastest CF cards are faster than the fastest SD cards is out of date information. The current UHS-3 (ultra high speed class 3) SD cards are faster: http://www.adorama.com/IDSDEPU216.html<br>

The problem is that at this point, only a few digital cameras are fully compatible with those new SD cards, in the sense that those cameras can take full advantage of that speed. Unfortunately, the D810 is not among them, as the D810 is only UHS-1 compliant. If you use those cards on the D810, you are wasting the cards' potential.</p>

<p>Back to the OP's question. The D700 has only one (CF) memory card slot. If you are new to DSLRs with dual slots, to me, the best practice is to use both slots; set it up in backup mode so that the same RAW file from each capture is written onto both cards. In the rare event that one side is corrupted, you still have another copy as a back up. That happened to me a couple of years ago when my D800E was new. After a few occurrences, I stopped using that defective SD card: http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00akyq</p>

<p>I agree with Shun -- if a camera has two slots, use both so you have a backup, regardless of which type of card.<br /><br />I actually preferred CF cards, not for technical reason but for physical/ergonomic reasons. A few years ago when SD cards had just come out, I was photo editing at a major trade show in New York, with shooters bringing me their cards after each event to copy and hand back to them. On the way home, I got a panicked call from one of my photographers who couldn't find one of his cards with hundreds of pictures on it. I promised to send him duplicate files. But a few hours later he called back to say he had found the card -- the SD was so thin it had slipped between the pages of a book. Good thing it was a book he was still reading or the "lost" pictures could have ended up on his bookshelf for years. :)</p>

<p>Unfortunately, both CF and SD cards have some physical issues. CF has the vulnerable pins on the camera/card reader side. I have seen people bending pin inside the camera, and that involves a lot of labor cost to take the camera apart to replace the socket. Personally, I have never had that issue on a camera, but I have had bent pins on some cheap CF card reader that are shallow.</p>

<p>SD cards are indeed small. I have physically bent a few of them accidentally and cracked the casing. I have also lost a number of them since I started using SD with the D7000 in 2010. I have used CF for much longer, since the D100 in 2002, and I have never lost any CF card.</p>

<p>Again, if you can afford a $3300 D810 and apparently photography is important to you, I would spend an extra $100 to $200 on some additional cards of both types and use them in the backup mode. The D810 is 36MP vs. 12MP for the D700. Chance is that your old cards for the D700 will not hold that many 36MP images.</p>

<p>One thing I've noticed at least on the D700 and D800 is that larger cards make the camera less responsive - presumably because of extra time spent processing the FAT structure, or some such. Particularly, a slow 64GB card is much less responsive than a slow 8GB card, and I've made a point of sticking to the 16-32GB range for my D800. Also on the D800, it's particularly useful to have fast cards, because - in addition to the huge files - the camera hangs after taking a live view image until the images have been stored; in live view shooting on a D800, card speed has a direct effect on the responsiveness of the camera. I believe all other Nikons write to the card in the background whether or not in live view, which makes the card speed much less important unless you're in the habit of filling the buffer. One reason I'm looking forward to getting a D810 (eventually) is that this won't be a problem, meaning that I won't feel limited in using a relatively slow Eye-Fi card in the SD slot for when I want to stream images.<br />

<br />

A pedantic distinction: "U3" is a UHS class 3 (30MB/s) card for 4K video. These are typically still UHS-I devices. UHS-II is different, and adds performance with an additional row of pins (which very few things, and certainly no current Nikons, currently support - currently I'm aware of only the Fuji X-T1 and the Samsung NX1 supporting UHS-II, but I've not really been looking). Be wary of "UHS-3" - that's confusing terminology. U3, like U1, refers to the guaranteed transfer rate. UHS-I and UHS-II are factors in the peak data transfer rate, though there's more to it than that.</p>

<p>Andrew, thanks for the correction. I got confused myself and should have pointed out that I was referring to UHS-II high-speed cards that the D810 cannot take full advantage of.</p>

<p>No problem, Shun. I blame the SD Association for being confusing. I get mixed up myself. Bring back MMC, I say. :-)</p>

<p>Back when a D300 was a regular workhorse camera body for me, I was very happy with CF cards. I had a few other devices that used SD cards, and always found them potentially flimsy (and, at the time, slower). Never had a pin-bend when I was changing out CF cards untold hundreds (thousands?) of times.<br /><br />Now, it's SD format cards for everything, and I'll admit they're just fine. I use micro-SD cards in some airborne drone cameras, and use SD in multiple camera bodies of various formats - DSLRs, mirrorless, and now a fancy-pants video body. And it is indeed nice to be able to pop those cards into readers built right into all sorts of devices and computers. <br /><br />But if I had a body that could only do two-card writes (for redundancy) by using one SD and one CF, I'd use both - because however annoying it is to have to use two formats, the safety of writing to two cards is absolutely worth it.</p>

<p>Anyway you cut it you want the fastest cards possible in your D810. For most shooting situation regular cards are fine but if you regularly shoot burst of images (sports, wildlife,...) the card speed is critical if you want to keep shooting without filling the buffer in mid sequence.</p>

<p>A couple years ago most test sites demonstrated that CF cards were faster and recommended for stills while SDXC were better for movies. Not sure if that was true or not but Rob Galbraith site lists CF at the top of the speed game.<br>

Note sure if this is still relevant but here is the link: http://www.robgalbraith.com/camera_wb_multi_page9ec1.html?cid=6007-12451</p>

<p>It also seems that Lexar has the fastest CF cards while Sandisk has the fastest SDXC cards. I have been happy with both using Sandisk Extreme Pro 32GB and 64GB in both formats as well as Lexar 1000x and 1066x 64GB CFs. There are now much faster cards in both formats but you will pay a fortune for them.</p>

<p>One caution... Be very vigilant when buying online, there are a lot of copycat cards around, especially SDs.</p>

<p>Thanks for the update, Shun.</p>

<p>Does anyone know the logic behind mixing card formats? I totally understand have two card slots, but I'm baffled as to why they would mix and match card formats. Adding to my confusion is the fact that the prosumer models don't use two formats, but the pro models do. Does anyone know the reason for this?</p>

<p>Please don't take this as official information, but my guess is that Nikon put one CF and one SD in the D300S because the earlier D300 uses just one CF. Therefore, keeping one CF slot maintains that compatibility. However, CF slots are large and it would be difficult to find room on the camera to have two CF slots. The only Nikon DSLRs that have two CF slots are the pro D3 series with an integrated grip: D3, D3X, and D3S. From the D300 to D300S, Nikon changed from the thicker CF type 2 compatibility (which is essentially micro hard drives, which were rarely used by 2007 when the D300 was introduced) to CF type 1 compatible only to squeeze out some room for the 2nd, SD card.</p>

<p>The D800 (including the E) and the D810 essentially follow the same philosophy. It keeps on CF slot to maintain compatibility with D700 cards and earlier (although you pretty much have to buy new cards anyway going from 12MP to 36MP) and for the 2nd card they use SD to save space. Another advantage is that those SD cards are interchangeable if you also use a D600, D610, D750 or D7000/D7100 ....</p>

<p>Shun is probably right. I would add that large capacity high speed CFs tend to be cheaper than their SD equivalents. They are also faster. But all these tend to be irrelevant nowadays.<br>

I like having both formats using the CF card for saving my RAW images and the SD card for saving a fine JPEG copy. The idea is that I can upload the JPEGs into an iPad when the computer is not around.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>One thing I've noticed at least on the D700 and D800 is that larger cards make the camera less responsive</p>

</blockquote>

<p> <br>

That's not what <a href="http://www.robgalbraith.com/camera_wb_multi_page9ec1.html?cid=6007-12451">testing</a> shows. What tests have you run that show this?</p>

<p>Oops - sorry, Jeff - I left the country for a week and forgot about this thread. Rob's page shows data transfer times, which are hopefully a different issue from traversing the page table. My experience - and I'll admit I noticed this more with the D700 - was that the camera took longer to chimp images and to respond after a card was inserted if the card was bigger, I believe irrespective of whether there was anything on the card. I don't claim the cards are completely identical other than size, but I believe the quoted speed of the 8GB card was slower than the quoted speed of the 32GB card I tried this on, and the 32GB was very noticeably slower. I've not checked as much on my D800e, and I'll admit that there wasn't much difference between the Lexar 1000x 32GB I now (mostly) use and the 16GB version I (mostly) used before. Thom Hogan says:</p>

 

<blockquote>The real issue here is balance of card size versus file size. Really large cards do slow down the camera for image review. So that temptation to buy 64GB cards? Suppress it. 8GB is probably the right balance, and certainly no more than 16GB.</blockquote>

 

<p>...in <a href="http://www.bythom.com/nikond800review.htm">his D800 review</a>, which I assume is a reference to the same issue. I've no idea if anything's changed in the D810. The images write quite fast enough for me from my D700 no matter which size card I use (I rarely fill the buffer), but the delay in reviewing is inconvenient sometimes.<br />

<br />

On my D800e, I use the Lexar 1000x CF cards (now usually 32GB, with 16GB as a back-up; I also have a load of cheaper cards when needed if I really run out of space) for raw files. I simultaneously write JPEG (and video) to a Sandisk 16GB Extreme Pro UHS-I (U1) card. That's allegedly slightly slower than the CF, but the JPEGs are smaller anyway. The SD is slightly easier to get access to in a hurry, if I need the JPEGs for immediate posting somewhere - I'm less fussed about the raw files, since if I'm ready to Photoshop them I've usually got my full set of readers. By the way, I bought a lot of cheap card readers before I gave up and got the expensive Lexar USB3 ones, which are the first I've found that will actually achieve decent transfer speeds on both the CF card and SD cards that I own - cheap readers I've tried can do one or the other, but either ignore one card or only transfer very slowly. At least fast cards now are much cheaper than when I bought mine.<br />

<br />

When (if?) I get a D810, I'll likely try to supplement this set with an Eye-Fi, since the live view shooting lock-out should get rid of some of my need for fast cards and the ability to punt data direct to a computer is sometimes useful. I keep hoping Eye-Fi will update their pro card with a U1 version.<br />

<br />

Hope that helps.</p>