Any reason the D810 doesn't come with 2 SD card slots like the D750? Why one Compact Flash slot and the other an SD card slot?

george_eppich · June 10, 2015

Hello everyone. Recently got the Nikon D810 and noticed it had a Compact Flash card slot and an SD card slot. Why couldn't it have had 2 SD card slots like the D750? Is there an advantage to having 2 different types of cards? Is there an advantage to Compact Flash over SD or vice versa?

Thanks in advance and take care.

-George

lornesunley · June 10, 2015

Historically, the CF cards have a faster transfer rate than the SD cards

Dieter Schaefer · June 10, 2015

the CF cards have a faster transfer rate than the SD cards

</blockquote>

My thoughts exactly - though if you use the SD as backup, then the slower card will dictate the overall transfer rate. Like the bigger form factor too - those SD cards are just too small and also appear quite fragile. Then again, the contact pins for the CF cards can be problematic too. I use the CF card in the D810 as my primary, and the SD as overflow/backup as required.

</blockquote>

ellis_vener_photography · June 10, 2015

What Lorne wrote.

Jochen_S · June 11, 2015

(Single) CF cards were there first and Nikon did well to build a bridge for owners of their heritage cameras. - This hits probably a subconscious part of the buyer but is important to make a camera more appealing.

1.2k · June 11, 2015

cf cards are faster than sd cards

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/compactflash-charts/benchmarks,170.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/sd-cards-2014/benchmarks,168.html

xqd > cf > sd

Wouter Willemse · June 11, 2015

Plus, historically, most of the "target audience" for the D800/D810 already own(ed) CF cards, as on all older upper level Nikon DSLRs (D300, D700, D2, D3), there was only CF, as back when those cameras came out, SD was still lots slower than CF (it closed most of the gap, but as noted not all).

ilkka_nissila · June 11, 2015

In practice I find that CF cards of similar nominal speed transfer data faster to my computer than SD. The CF cards also have a hard shell more difficult to break. Finally it is a bridge between other cameras that the user might have e.g. D4s, professional cameras of previous generations (D700, D3 etc.). In general I would prefer both card slots to be of the same type so I could manage my cards more efficiently, but ... Nikon probably wanted to migrate users from other cameras so a mixed slot type approach works for that.

Two23 · June 11, 2015

I too find the two card types a PITA. I would have been happy with just two SD slots.

Kent in SD

Landrum Kelly · June 11, 2015

In this particular case, it might also reflect that fact that Nikon surely did not want to do a massive overhaul of the D800 body--just get the "sequel" out there with a minimum of change and cost.

--Lannie

Peter_in_PA · June 11, 2015

I've never had a camera with two slots, but I've never ever lost an image because of card failure either. I think this feature was a solution looking for a problem.

But I'm an amateur. If I were a pro, I wouldn't use a camera WITHOUT this feature for a wedding or event, now that's available. So what do I know.

That said, I agree with Kent. two different kinds of card slots is fairly boneheaded at this point I think.

ShunCheung · June 11, 2015

While I have never had a total card failure that leads to losing all images on the card, I have had a few image corruptions, apparently due to a bad card I had: http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00akyq

In fact, I lost one of the last images of my parents together three years ago; fortunately, having dual cards on the D800E saved the day. My mother suddenly had a stroke a few day after I had captured that series of images and passed away.

CF is essentially the left over "standard" memory card from a decade ago. Prior to the 2005 D50, Nikon DSLRs only used one CF card. The D50 was the first one that uses one SD card. A lot of pros and serious amateurs still have CF cards left over from their D2X, D3, D700, and D300 .... Therefore, the D800 uses one CF and one SD as a compromise. Having two CF card slots would have made the camera huge, so only the D3 family is big enough to accommodate two CF slots. The D810 continues that same compromise, but expect CF to be phased out in the coming generation of digital cameras. The question is whether XQD or the incompatible CF2 (not compatible with the traditional CF) will take over.

Suggesting that SD are slower is out of date information. The latest UHS-2 SD cards are very fast, but to date, no Nikon DSLR is compatible with the UHS-2 standard. However, SD cards are indeed very small and are prone to loss and damage. I have cracked a few SD cards as well as lost a few.

P.S. That is also why I don't take those higher-end mirrorless cameras with only one memory card slot too seriously.

steven_clark · June 11, 2015

It's worth mentioning that CF (and PC card flash before it ) is effectively a form of Parallel ATA like a ten-year-old hard disk. The standard is OLD. These days parallel standards are being ditched in favor of high-speed serial or multiple serial links because there are a bunch of engineering issues like clock skew between the wires that make it hard to increase the speeds of parallel links.

Dieter Schaefer · June 11, 2015

incompatible CF2 (not compatible with the traditional CF)

</blockquote>

I assume you mean CFast? Faster than SD UHS-2 by a margin similar to the difference between current CF and SD - but as you state, CFast is not compatible with the CF (and SD UHS-2 not supported by any current Nikon camera). So for what's currently usable, the statement CF is faster than SD still holds. I assume a camera firmware upgrade could allow the use of SD UHS-2 cards in current cameras - there is no such chance for CFast.

While I have never had a total card failure that leads to losing all images on the card

</blockquote>

Me neither - though a lost the majority of one-day shooting when a new card failed. Not sure if I forgot to format it in camera or if it just was corrupt to begin with and would have failed anyway - formatting or not.

</blockquote>

ShunCheung · June 11, 2015

Sorry, I meant CFast 2.0, which is the "standard" Canon is favoring, while Sony and Nikon are using XQD. So we have VHS vs. Beta, BluRay vs. HD-DVD once again. With multiple "standards," in reality there is no standard, and some of them will eventually lose out. I just don't want to be stuck with a bunch of expensive memory cards that become out of favor.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine had most of her images on a Lexar SD card corrupted, from a D7000. It was a rather important shoot, and she wasn't experienced enough to test the card first and use dual cards for backup: http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00bgdu She was never able to recover her images other than some tiny imbedded JPEGs.

Such major memory card failures, especially from established brands, are certainly rare occurrences, but they do happen.

Andrew Garrard · June 11, 2015

As Shun says, UHS-II cards are capable of going faster than any current CF card, but Nikon don't support the extra pins for UHS-II - although the cards should still work with the lower-speed interface. Dieter: UHS-II does require new hardware to get the better performance; firmware might fix any compatibility problems in slow mode, but won't get you the speed.

The fastest standard UHS-I SD card is not quite as fast as the fastest available CF cards (I have what I believe to be both, since you really need speed if you want live view on the D800 not to be painful). Typically, I write raw to the CF card and JPEG to the SD card, based on the relative speed. CF is a bit nicer to use in terms of being harder to lose or break, but obviously size has disadvantages as well. Historically, microdrives were very useful in CF format (especially if you pulled a cheap 4GB one out of a Creative MuVo), but they were type-II and pretty much useless even when the D700 came out, even if they'd still been economical at that point. SD is handy in allowing things like Eye-Fi. Arguably they're both more flexible than you'd think - CF cards can also be a subset of PCMCIA, and there are, for example, <a href="http://www.lifeview.com.tw/html/products/discontinued_products/flypresenter_cf.htm">CF-card graphics adaptors</a>, just as I believe there are cameras that slot into SD-cards (or possibly MMC-cards). Unfortunately, "SD-card camera" turns out to be impossible to google for usefully, otherwise I'd show a link.

The problem with CompactFlash is that there are <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/">competing standards</a>, with the result that nobody seems willing to take the bet on the SATA-based CFast or the PCI-e-based XQD. This actively put me off renting a D4 recently, since I didn't want to get an expensive XQD card solely to have backups of my photos (whereas a dual-CF camera like a D3s would have been fine). Two standards means nobody adopts anything for a while, something that the industry probably should have learnt back with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, or VHS and Betamax, or... insert tens of other examples. In this case, SD card is taking the market share, and would do by more if UHS-II was getting more traction - at least it's backwards-compatible. Though one could argue that SD cards are being competed with by micro-SD...

So. I'm happy to have a CF slot in the D8x0, because I'd have been annoyed if all my cards (and I have a lot) for my D700 (and, previously, Eos 300D) had been useless - and the compatibility scare on the D810 didn't help there. I'm happy to have the SD slot, because Eye-Fi and because it's good to be able to stuff the card in a laptop (or someone else's laptop) without getting out my USB3 reader. Would two the same have merits? Yes. Of course, you can always consider a CF/SD adaptor, which is one way of getting symmetrical slots. Whether you get the same speed as you would driving the card directly - and especially whether Eye-Fi cards an similar work - is another matter. Currently I have enough CF cards that I'm not rushing to do that - and I recently bought a 32GB CF card, along with an Eye-Fi. If I'd started with SD cameras and had a stash, I might be more tempted.

mike_halliwell · June 12, 2015

Obviously there comes a point where legacy card support becomes the bottle neck, coupled with a reluctance by a manufacturer to 'force' the shooter into ditching a large stock pile of cards.

If Nikon are only going to put XQD in the 'silly money' D4 and eventual D5 series, nothing is going to trickle down to the lower end bodies.

I recently got my first twin-slot camera, a used D3S for equestrian shooting. For sales on the day it's Large Fine Jpeg to one slot and RAW to the other. The JPEG cards get collected by a guy on a trials bike and I keep the RAW as secure backup. You can get a new Sandisk 32GB 50mb/s for £20, that's the back-up card and I've got a whole bunch or 4 and 8 GB Sandisk Ultra's and Extremes for the bike guys.

The combined buffer and card speed mean I've never been locked-out (yet!) but the D3S files aren't that huge. So faster cards wouldn't help me.

However, if Nikon aren't going to make anything rivalling D4 speed in fps, there's no real need for progress in the card-speed department.

24Mpix and a leisurely 6 fps* is currently catered for, and with no need for more pixels or speed, there's no need for faster cards.

Luddites will Rule the World or is that the Meek shall Inherit the Earth?...whichever comes soonest.

* OK, so the D750 can add 1/2 a frame a second, making it 6.5 fps.

mike_halliwell · June 12, 2015

Late Edit.

really need speed if you want live view on the D800 not to be painful

</blockquote>

Yup, my D5300 does the LV Black-Out thing too. Really, really crap design 'feature'... Just what were they thinking?

Andrew Garrard · June 12, 2015

Ooh - I had no idea the D5300 had the same problem. That's interesting, if the D5300 is Expeed 4-based and the D800 is Expeed 3 (although I suspect the numbering sweeps quite a lot of detail under the carpet). It mostly doesn't bother me that much because I bought fast cards, other than that it's persuaded me to spend more on flash storage.

I had no idea how fast the fast cards actually are until I stuck the Eye-Fi in the camera (and only because I was out of SD storage after a lot of wedding photos - I wasn't using the wifi). I wasn't doing live view, I just filled the D810's buffer - though admittedly in raw backup mode, not JPEG. It was my first experience in some years of "why won't the camera take a shot?" (other than when the cards were full) - the buffer took most of a minute to flush. And the Eye-Fi is still class 10.

1.2k · June 12, 2015

stupid sandisk hompage..

there are 280mb/s sd cards and 160mb/s cf cards.

sony offers 400mb/s xqd and sandisk 515 or something mb/s cfast 2 cards.

so it seems to be something like

cf2 xqd sd cf

ShunCheung · June 12, 2015

<a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/compactflash-charts/benchmarks,170.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/compactflash-charts/benchmarks,170.html</a> <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/sd-cards-2014/benchmarks,168.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/sd-cards-2014/benchmarks,168.html</a>

xqd > cf > sd

</blockquote>

Norbert, your problem was that you were reading a 2014 web page, while we are in the middle of 2015 already. These electronics change every few hours. Any info over a day or two old is out of date. :-)

A few years ago when Nikon introduced the D4, I asked them about the dual XQD + CF strategy. Essentially they kept one CF on the D4 and D800 because a lot of their high-end users have CF cards from the earlier DSLRs, and people want to continue using them. That design continues to their successors in the D4S and D810. For these electronics we are essentially in a continuous transition. New will keep replacing old.

Essentially it doesn't matter whether CF or SD is theoretically faster. None of the current DSLRs can take full advantage of the fastest speed anyway. We aren't exactly shooting 50MP @ 20 fps.

mike_halliwell · June 12, 2015

None of the current DSLRs can take full advantage of the fastest speed anyway.

</blockquote>

So, is there a table of write speed of current cameras?

ShunCheung · June 12, 2015

None of the current DSLRs can take full advantage of the fastest speed anyway.

</blockquote>

My poor choice of word. Instead of a very definitive "none," I should have said like few current DSLRs can take advantage of modern memory card speed. For example, Canon's 1DX is still using the relatively slow CF cards. The Canons that use CFast 2 are the higher-end camcorders, not DSLRs.

Perhaps the D4/D4S can take full advantage of XQD, but no Nikon DSLR that uses SD can take advantage of UHS-2 at this point.

Andrew Garrard · June 12, 2015

Norbert, I can find your 150MB/s claim in the context for reading (how fast you can read data off the card) from a Lexar 1000x Pro card, which also claims 95MB/s writing, which is roughly the write figure I see claimed for the UHS-I SD card I'm already using, which is definitely a little slower than my UDMA-7 CF card. Writing is significant if you care about the camera not running out of buffer (or, in the case of the D800, locking up); reading matters if you worry about download speed, and it - within reason - matters much less to me. Lexar also have 2000x cards rated at 300MB/s read/260MB/s write; I've not checked what their competitors offer. But these are UHS-II cards - you won't get that speed out of almost any current camera, and I'm not sure what speed those cards will manage in UHS-I (one row of pins) mode.

Essentially there's not much in it with the SD and CF original interfaces, and while the alternatives can duke out theoretical specs, they're not exactly swamping the market with implementations.

Mike: I'd be interested in a table as well. DPReview tend to do performance metrics, but obviously you can't always compare like-with-like because the cards vary. Of conventional interfaces, Rob Galbraith did a <a href="http://www.robgalbraith.com/camera_wb_multi_page9ec1.html?cid=6007-12451">card comparison</a> on a D800 a few years back; I'll be interested to know if anyone's got an updated version of the same table which can also be indexed by camera. The cards I use (other than the Eye-Fi) are essentially the ones from the top of his list, since as far as I can tell, UHS-I and UDMA 7 cards don't seem to have progressed hugely in performance.

In the absence of the aforementioned 50MP 20fps camera, what seems to be driving card speeds most at the moment is UHD/4K video, especially if you want it uncompressed for editing/grading. Once we start getting 8K in consumer products, we'll have real storage transfer problems. The D8x0 sensor is only off the pixels you need because of the aspect ratio; the A7R-II has just enough samples (which might explain the apparently minor sensor resolution bump if Sony have plans for that sensor), and the 5Ds/r obviously have enough. It's a brave new world, and even I might shut up about storage becoming more affordable. Not that I'm even doing much HD shooting right now.

Dieter Schaefer · June 13, 2015

Dieter: UHS-II does require new hardware to get the better performance; firmware might fix any compatibility problems in slow mode, but won't get you the speed.

</blockquote>

Thanks Andrew for correcting my wrong assumption that SD UHS-1 and UHS-2 are pin-compatible.

I'll be interested to know if anyone's got an updated version of the same table which can also be indexed by camera.

</blockquote>

There's this: http://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/

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Any reason the D810 doesn't come with 2 SD card slots like the D750? Why one Compact Flash slot and the other an SD card slot?

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