(Credit: René Ramos; EyeEm Mobile GmbH/iStock, Wong Yu Liang/Moment, Steven Puetzer/The Image Bank vi)
If you haven't shopped for a new memory card or SSD in recent months, you may be in for a shock when you see current prices. More and more AI data centers are being built and expanded, and since the big companies are gobbling up the solid-state memory that keeps servers going, consumers are feeling a squeeze. PC builders have felt the pain for months, and while the effects took a little longer to hit the digital camera memory card space, they're here. Many cards cost twice as much today as they did when I first wrote this guide last summer, and Sony has halted production on its popular SD card line. That's the bad news. The good news is that you may not need an expensive, ultra-fast card for your specific camera. Read on to find out how to figure out what kind of card your camera needs, when to get a cheap SD card, and when you need to bite down and spend the money on high-end storage media.
Consider What Kind of Camera You Have
Most cameras have used some version of Secure Digital (SD) media for the better part of the 21st century. Some may support faster cards, and the current professional standard is CFexpress, an updated version of the old Compact Flash cards that were common when DSLRs first went on sale. If your camera has a CFe slot, chances are this article is not for you, and you should be buying expensive memory. For more information, read our CFexpress explainer.
But if you have a regular digital point-and-shoot, an entry-level SLR or mirrorless, or an older professional camera, you'll often be able to get away with spending far less and get the exact same speed. That's because basic cameras, not the card, represent the bottleneck in the system. You'll have to look up some tech specs in your camera's manual or online documentation to get started.
All SD cards are reusable; you can fill them up, download pictures to your computer, reformat, and use them again thousands of times. That doesn't mean they'll last forever—if you start getting errors when trying to save photos to a card or on playback, it's time to retire the card and get a fresh one.
Capacity: SD vs. SDHC vs. SDXC
The first thing you should check is exactly what flavor of SD cards your camera supports. Most people just say "SD" when talking about memory, but there are actually three different generations to consider.
SD is the original type of card. It was introduced way back in 2001 and displaced CompactFlash as the de facto standard compact camera memory card format within a couple of years. SD cards and slots max out at 2GB, so if you have a very old camera, you'll need to seek out low-capacity cards. Alternatively, you can check the manufacturer's support site to see if a firmware update is available to upgrade the slot to SDHC.
SDHC debuted in 2006 and upped the maximum card size to 32GB—HC stands for High Capacity.
SDXC followed in 2009 and expanded the file system to support 2TB cards. The SDUC standard supplanted SDXC in 2019 to add 128TB support, though it has yet to arrive in an actual product.
Physical Format: What About Other Card Types?
SD cards are pretty small, but fall short of tiny. GoPros, 360-degree cameras, and drones most often use microSD instead. It's the same from a technology standpoint, but far smaller physically. Check your manual to see if your camera works with microSD, microSDHC, or microSDXC. Like SDUC, microSDUC hasn't hit the market yet.
If you buy a small camera from a very specific era, you may find that it takes miniSD cards, a format that's bigger than microSD and smaller than SD. The miniSD format debuted in 2003 but only stuck around for about two years before microSD won over small device makers upon its 2005 release. I can't recall any cameras that use miniSD, and couldn't find any examples in my research, so it's more of an academic point.
Bus Speed: UHS-I or UHS-II
(Credit: René Ramos; SanDisk; adventtr/iStock via Getty Images)The bus speed represents the theoretical maximum throughput of a system. Modern SDHC and SDXC cards support three speeds: UHS-I, UHS-II, and UHS-III. But much like SDUC, no actual UHS-III products exist, so you can disregard it. You don't have to worry about speed for classic SD cards, but should pay attention when shopping for an SDHC or SDXC card.
If your camera has a UHS-I slot, there is no need to spend more on a UHS-II card. Instead, you should look for one with a speed rating around the 104MBps maximum. These cards are usually quite inexpensive at around $20 to $40 for 32GB or 64GB of storage, and perfectly fine for most Canon Rebel and Nikon D5000 series SLRs, as well as Sony a6000 series mirrorless cameras.
I've included one extra-tough, ruggedized card in our UHS-I picks as well. These types of cards cost a few dollars more but are built to survive trips through the washing machine or a drop in a puddle, and may be worthwhile for creators who work in the great outdoors and only carry a slight premium over basic cards.
There's a hole you can tumble into with UHS-I, however. Some card makers market UHS-I cards that promise speeds up to 200MBps and charge a slight premium for them. While it's true you'll see faster transfer speeds with these cards when using desktop USB card readers made to take advantage of the proprietary tech that doubles the standard data rate, you will not see any boost in performance in your camera.
Midrange and professional cameras often use UHS-II slots instead of UHS-I. If your camera supports UHS-II, it probably has a fast burst rate, high pixel count, fancy video features, or all three. In that case, you should spend more: Target a card that's rated for around 300MBps to get the most out of your camera for photography, and expect to pay at least $50 for a 64GB card, while 128GB cards start at around $70.
Video Recording: Class, U, or V Number
Movies have different data requirements than pictures. If your camera's buffer fills during a burst of photos, you'll be inconvenienced waiting for them to write to memory, but if your card proves too slow for movies, you can end up with dropped frames or corrupted files. Because of this, cards are labeled with a second figure that represents their continuous writing rate.
Classic SD cards use a Class (C) number along with a figure representing their continuous writing speed—for example, a C4 card writes at 4MBps. In UHS-I cards, this figure is given with a U instead, either U10 (10MBps) or U30 (30MBps). You'll see these figures printed on the labels of cards sold today, but you can ignore them and pay attention only to the V (for video) number.
The slowest cards on sale today are V10 (10MBps), but since V30 cards are often only a couple of dollars more for the same capacity, it's silly to buy V10. A V30 card will handle most of the 4K recording modes offered in mirrorless cameras. It can be expensive to step up to faster V60 or V90 media, so you should only do so if it's required for a recording feature you plan to use.
If you're buying for an older camera, you won't have to worry too much about the V number. The cards sold today are more than fast enough, so you'll most likely be fine with an inexpensive V30 card. For newer cameras, especially those with 4K and slow-motion video features, it is worth checking your manual to see if any recording modes require exotic memory cards. The Sony a7C II, for instance, requires expensive V90 cards for several of its video modes. If you use a top-end camera, you may simply have to buy an expensive card to access all of its recording features.
Get the Right Card, Not the Most Expensive One
You should now know pretty much everything you need to pick up a good memory card for your camera. Most photographers and vloggers will be absolutely fine with an SD card that's rated for V30 speeds, which is good news since those are still pretty affordable, even after recent upticks in overall memory pricing. But if you use more specialized equipment, remember to consult your camera manual to see if spending big on V90 will open up more features.