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So, I but a shiny new D800E camera. And it takes both CF and SD cards.
For the D700 my card of choice was the 16Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro CF card.

I have found that I can buy a 64Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro SD card for a whisker over $200.
But the cheapest I can find the same size CF card is about $380 (eBay from USA).

I'd like to find out what other people would recommend I buy in relation to memory cards. Speed isn't the main criteria, but quality is important.

Are there other brands I should be considering?

I also see the 128Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro CF card is now available... Pretty expensive though, and too many eggs in one basket for my liking.

I use Sandisk cards exclusively. I have never had a problem with them (other than accidentally formatting them )
Actually not quite true. I have a few Panasonic SD cards as well No problems there either.

In my D800, I tend to use the SD card as the main card, and the CF as the overflow. This is simply because my computer has a built in SD reader, but I have to drag out an external reader to read the CF card.
The overflow tends to happen when I forget to put the card back in the camera. The other time is when I am taking star trails. Then 2x 16Gb cards are not enough.

The D800 predicts 199 compressed RAW photos on my 16Gb SD card and 200 on my CF card, but I have taken up to 450 on each for stars and more than 250 for more normal subjects (I changed it then - it wasn't full)
I guess you need to work out the eggs versus capacity issue for yourself based on your shooting style, but I find the 16Gb cards an excellent value for money compromise.


I have to say I don't think card speed is an issue for the D800. The bottleneck seems to be reading the sensor. So I wouldn't bother to pay a premium for the superspeed cards.

I read somewhere that slower cards means more battery chew due to the longer write time. Not sure how much of an issue that is.

I also see that the approved memory cards are -
http://support.nikonusa.com/app/answers ... 0%2F-d800e

I see I can get a Lexar 64GB CompactFlash Professional 400x card for about half the cost of a Sandisk Extreme Pro card...
The problem is it isn't listed as being supported by the camera on that Nikon link.
Might have to settle for 32Gb cards and change them more often...

tasadam wrote:I read somewhere that slower cards means more battery chew due to the longer write time. Not sure how much of an issue that is.

A couple of months ago I switched from 2 x 16GB SanDisk Ultra in my D7000 to one 8Gb EyeFi Pro X2 in the primary slot and one 16GB SanDisk Ultra in the 2nd slot (as overflow). The EyeFi card is noticeably slower, especially formatting and the time between taking a photo and it appearing on the LCD (for the first photo for a minute or so). I mean, this is really slow. I have noticed no degradation in battery life other than that to be expected with uploading photos directly from the camera to my iPhone. Not a scientific test by any means but I don't seem to see any battery issues.

Unfortunately SD's are cheaper than CF's....but after a recent spate of broken SD's (Lexar corrupted on me, Kingston and Sony both physically broke) I am starting to really worry about SD cards. Thankfully my exclusive use of SanDisk Extreme Ducati/Extreme III/Extreme IV CF cards (all old) has proven to be reliable.

At the moment 16gb and 32gb seem to be the best value for money...

Mr Darcy wrote:The D800 predicts 199 compressed RAW photos on my 16Gb SD card and 200 on my CF card, but I have taken up to 450 on each for stars and more than 250 for more normal subjects (I changed it then - it wasn't full)

I think thats pretty normal - with my 32GB SD card in my D7000 - newly formatted it predicts 899 RAW images - yesterday I shot over 1000 images (school athletics carnival) and at the end my camera was still predicting over 400 more images.

ATJ wrote:

tasadam wrote:I read somewhere that slower cards means more battery chew due to the longer write time. Not sure how much of an issue that is.

A couple of months ago I switched from 2 x 16GB SanDisk Ultra in my D7000 to one 8Gb EyeFi Pro X2 in the primary slot and one 16GB SanDisk Ultra in the 2nd slot (as overflow). The EyeFi card is noticeably slower, especially formatting and the time between taking a photo and it appearing on the LCD (for the first photo for a minute or so). I mean, this is really slow. I have noticed no degradation in battery life other than that to be expected with uploading photos directly from the camera to my iPhone. Not a scientific test by any means but I don't seem to see any battery issues.

NB I get basically the same - I have my 32GB SanDisk Extreme in my primary slot and the 8GB EyeFi in the secondary slot as overflow only (so the reverse). I have no slowness on writes (it's writing to the SanDisk card) (not that I can tell anyway) but I do see slowness on initial reads - i.e. if I actually press the play button to bring up an image review later on it takes a while to kick in (a noticable delay - I'm assuming because it is trying to read the directory, etc of both cards - once up and showing me the images from the SanDisk card it's normal speed again - e.g. when I flick forward, back, etc). I also notice no battery life degradation because of the two cards but I'm not really writing to the slow one.

I'm using 32 Gb SanDisk Extreme Pro (90MB/s) CF as primary & 64 Gb SanDisk Extreme Pro SD (95 MB/s) as secondary.
Both cards bought from Amazon during a memory card sale.

I believe that I may have read somewhere (possibly Thom Hogan, but not absolutely sure) that the transfer of images in the camera was a tad faster when going to CF rather than SD.

I prefer to have majority of use to CF because they are sturdier and also easier to manage.

Edit: Yes, Thom Hogan says that the fastest CF cards outperform the fastest SD cards in the D800: 60MBs v 45 MBs in his tests.
He says though, that SD cards perform better for video because the camera directly controls the card, whereas a CF card acts a bit more like a hard disk. (I'm not really sure what he means by this, but I have reproduced it here for you techie guys to inform me.)

Sandisk extreme video SD card - been through the washing machine a few months ago. Still goes although there are occasionally corrupt pictures!

Transfers at 26mb/s through my netbook card reader.

surenj wrote:Sandisk extreme video SD card - been through the washing machine a few months ago.

If I want to get rid of dirty pics I just format the card. Seems to do the trick…

Steffen wrote:

surenj wrote:Sandisk extreme video SD card - been through the washing machine a few months ago.

If I want to get rid of dirty pics I just format the card. Seems to do the trick…

If you're not aware, Rob Galbraith has a database on cards.