Update of Memory Cards & Card Readers

[Albert Sim]

Going thru the forum of this "Camera Memory Card", seems like the info therein are somewhat outdated, such as now even the Lexar Professional 600X CF is phasing out and replaced by the latest 1000X. Well, to begin with :

1. Lexar Professional 1000X CF or Sandisk Extreme Pro 90mb/s CF. Which is BEST suitable for the massive resolution Nikon D800 ?

2. Consequently, Which Card Reader to go with ? (USB3.0 comply)

Any suggestion or .....

Thank you guys and girls.

[Manfred M]

If you look at the D800 manual; the fastest approved Lexar card is the 600x Professional UDMA; so you are on your own wth the 1000X card. The Sandisk Extreme Pro is 600x. I'm shooting the Sandisk Extreme (400X) in my D800 and am fine with it. The higher speed cards are not something I was willing to pay for at this time, and the slower card is fine. Mostly this affects me only when I download images to the computer; I haven't run into a buffering issue while shooting yet.

The one thing that you do need to do is have USB3 capabilities on your computer and on top of having a USB3 card reader. In my case I installed an add-on USB3 card and my motherboard does not have native support. I haven't bothered with a USB3 card reader yet and do a direct connection to USB3 computer port using the port on the camera to download the files. It takes a bit of time for the camera and Adobe Bridge to set up a connection, but after that things move along quite nicely. Somehow my card reader is a bit hit and miss with CF card, so I'm not using it.

[Albert Sim]

If you look at the D800 manual; the fastest approved Lexar card is the 600x Professional UDMA; so you are on your own wth the 1000X card. The Sandisk Extreme Pro is 600x. I'm shooting the Sandisk Extreme (400X) in my D800 and am fine with it. The higher speed cards are not something I was willing to pay for at this time, and the slower card is fine. Mostly this affects me only when I download images to the computer; I haven't run into a buffering issue while shooting yet.


The one thing that you do need to do is have USB3 capabilities on your computer and on top of having a USB3 card reader. In my case I installed an add-on USB3 card and my motherboard does not have native support. I haven't bothered with a USB3 card reader yet and do a direct connection to USB3 computer port using the port on the camera to download the files. It takes a bit of time for the camera and Adobe Bridge to set up a connection, but after that things move along quite nicely. Somehow my card reader is a bit hit and miss with CF card, so I'm not using it.

Oppppp.. Manfred, I didn't know that D800 takes in a max of 600X ! I am still waiting for my D800. It's out of stock in Malaysia and I had already waited for 2 long long weeks ! Those cards are on my shopping list and lucky to have you guys advising me so. That is cool man, I can save quite a lot of money to go for the 400X or even the 600X.

My PC supports USB3 and in actual facts, I am thinking too of using the camera itself to download the file first before I source out enough info to go for a good card reader.

You see my camera salesman recommended me to take Sandisk Extreme Pro 90mb/s (600X), but the Customer Service of a renowned Mail-Service Provider from USA strongly advised me to go for Lexar 1000X. That made me confused and so I come here for help.

Thank you so much, Manfred. You really help.

[koolkat]

In regards to adding a USB 3.0 card to an existing motherboard I've been told that this will not allow the 3.0 speeds. The MB needs to be 3.0 capable versus the add on card or even the card reader. Everything in the computer system has to be capable to handle the higher speeds that 3.0 allows.

[Inkanyezi]

In regards to adding a USB 3.0 card to an existing motherboard I've been told that this will not allow the 3.0 speeds. The MB needs to be 3.0 capable versus the add on card or even the card reader. Everything in the computer system has to be capable to handle the higher speeds that 3.0 allows.

Adding a USB 3.0 card should make the computer capable of handling it, as I suppose such a card would imply that it is put in a slot that can handle USB 3.0.

PCI boards are not up to the speed of USB 3.0, but significantly faster than USB 2.0, and thus can handle up to 133 MB/s, while PCI Express can handle the USB 3.0 speed of 500 MB/s. Apart from that, no particular capability of the motherboard should bottleneck transfer. So even if the computer does not have any PCI Express slot, even a USB3 card for PCI, if there is one, should give significantly higher transfer rate than USB2.

Most of today's computers do have PCI express slots, and for the USB3 speed the small one (1x) is sufficient.