M. J. is doing a deep dive into memory cards. Specifically SD cards. If you wanted to get up to speed on SDs (pun intended) you might want to visit the link in my text.

Here are links to the two most recent articles about memory cards from Mike Johnston's: TheOnlinePhotographer blog: 

Read this one first: https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2024/05/sd_cards.html

Read this one if you are price sensitive and want to see cards available with a small range of differences in parameters from different suppliers:

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2024/05/price-comparison-for-top-sd-type-cards.html

As your resident contrarian I have differing views about SD cards than Mike and many of his commenters.  But everyone's use case is different and that's important to keep in mind. 

Most commenters on his site talked, with pride, about using small storage size cards from years and years ago and that they were perfectly happy with the performance, speed and even capacity of UHS-I cards originally purchased with cameras of previous generations. All well and good. No sense putting a huge capacity memory card into a camera like my Canon G15 or G10. Likely the camera wouldn't know what to do with one if offered.

And that's perfectly understandable since the vast majority of readers here and at Mike's site are not working professionals. Are not looking for super fast transfers between camera and computer and are not looking for the ability to record high spec 4 or 6K video with their cameras. They just don't. 

For the great bulk of casual imaging that all of us do we can get along just fine with cards that are reliable, hold themselves together well, physically; and are fast enough not to make waiting to shoot more frames into a habitually frustrating nuisance. No matter how well engineered and how "of the moment" some of the cards I own are nothing on the card side (once you are using UHS-II cards with V30 and above ratings) is going to make my old Leica M240s write faster or stop hitting the wall to take their time buffering ..... seemingly forever. I'm pretty sure the logjam is the bus speed of the camera. But we try our best to work around these flaws. Or features...

I have tons of Sandisk, Lexar and Transcend UHS-I cards in 32mb and 64mb that have been in the studio for years and years. I can put one in an older camera and they do just fine. If I'm not shooting enormous raw files at fast frame rates I could certainly continue using the old cards even in new cameras  like the SL2 and the current S series Panasonics. But where faster cards become more important is when you are out on a job, shooting high quality video, or shooting over one thousand big raw files at a go. 

That's where the dividing lines are between why we spend more money on good cards and why legions of people are happy to settle, on the other hand, for good enough. Because, in the digital world, if the file gets reliably written to the card without corruption, and you don't need to be endlessly efficient, then it's all binary. It either works or it doesn't. The cards, other than providing speed and capacity, have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the files. That's just not an issue. Your files won't have less dynamic range or less accurate color if they are saved to an 8 megabyte SD card. They'll be as creative and sparkly and full of pizzaz as the same files saved to the latest and most expensive cards. Really. 

So why do crazy commercial photographers buy crazy fast cards? Why indeed?

Nearly everyone who responded to Mike's first article reported never having had an incident or accident with a memory card. To read through the comments one would think that SD cards are bullet proof and will stand the ravages of time immemorial. And maybe for users with a light touch on the shutter button this will be true and continue to be true. But that's not been my experience. In my experience cards can and will fail. And mostly they start to fail after lots of use. LOTS of use. Format-shoot-format-ad infinitum.

Where some hobbyist might go through one or two thousand images in a year with their primary camera I live in a different reality. In a recent portrait session with two attorneys I shot nearly 300 fifty megapixel raw files in order to get some variety in expressions and also to play around with subject and background variations. Sometimes shoots grow on their own as you see better and better images arrive over the course of a session. Stop too early and you might miss some fun stuff. 

The week before I was at the bank conference in San Antonio and logged about 2300 images with my SL2. I was happy to have fast cards loaded into the camera because I wanted to catch fleeting moments and expressions and it's frustrating to work with a camera/card combination that slows down as the action heats up. 

In pre-Covid times, with 60 to 100 jobs per year and an average of 2,000 shots per job I was going through 200,000+ shots per year with maybe another 40 or 50 thousand personal shots as well. Work eats up time. Shooting takes time. More so if you have to wait for your cameras to write to slower cards. Or you end up hitting the camera buffers because the card creates a funnel. Like slowing down on the freeway when construction (or more likely, a wreck) causes lanes to drop from four to two to one. You might have a super fast camera but in the end it'll likely be a card that causes the hold up. And then you deal with a similar problem on the other end: transferring slow cards to your computer. The slower the card the longer you'll wait. My new MacBook Pro with an M3 processor and a fast SD card slot will really show up the difference between fast and slow cards. In some cases it's painfully obvious.

I don't shoot as much video as I have in the past but I still do the occasional interview with several cameras and I want to make sure I can deliver the highest quality possible to an editor so he can mess around with the files without damaging them too badly. Shooting in All-I in 4K, especially at higher frame rates generally calls for cards that can really write very fast and sustained data rates. I think most of the big video files require cards with something like 400 megabytes per second of sustainable performance, not just peak performance. Sadly, at least where economics is concerned, those kinds of card performance parameters generally call for V90 cards. The more expensive option, for sure. And since the files are really big, and coming at the camera fast, the cards need to have a much higher capacity than I would ever need for routine still photography projects. In fact, I'm trying to short term future-proof my memory card inventory to take this into consideration. 

In the past I had a few Delkin Black V90 cards but it was rare for our day-to-day video needs to press too hard on even V60 cards (vanilla 4K). The issue I've come to grips with lately is that many of our video shoots work best with three cameras running simultaneously. And with paying jobs, now that cameras are so equipped, I like to use two cards in each camera, backing up each other.  (Edit: I just checked in response to a comment by fellow Leica shooter, Chuck, and come to find out that my SL and SL2 don't write 4K video to two cards in a camera simultaneously. I've been inserting formatting and setting my cameras up with the assumption that they were writing/backing up video to two cards but I was wrong. I've never needed to resort to the images on the second card as a result of primary card failure so I just assumed that back ups were happening. I am now chastened. Sorry for the misinformation!!! Always test). And, some interviews can go long. Really long. 

So I am switching from a collection of mostly 64 and 128GB V60 cards and standardizing on 256GB V90 cards. At least two for each camera in a three camera set up. Of course all of these cards are UHS-II. That's not to say that I won't use lower spec'd cards for still photography projects. All those V60 cards of various sizes are still perfectly applicable for those situations. 

One more thing about having enough cards. When I come home from a week long event shoot there's a lot of post production that needs to get done to photography files. I pull the images from the cards and ingest them into Lightroom, depositing them across two different hard drives. But I fear a catastrophic computer meltdown that takes multiple hard drives down for the count before I have time and opportunity to upload the edited files (the saved files) to cloud storage, which is generally the third leg of my three-legged stool of short term archiving for work files. And precious family files. 

My short term solution is to pull the cards from the shoot and put them in an envelope with all the job details marked on it. The cards are moved from the office and languish in the house until everything has been edited, sent to the client, archived to the cloud, and to several drives in the office as well. If I use two cameras on a job that's usually four cards that are temporarily held out of service. If it's a three camera fun-fest of a job then that's six cards held back to stave off the ravages of Murphy's Law. 

But jobs don't come in on some logical, linear schedule. The delivery of images doesn't always happen before the next job wants or needs to start. Sometimes projects come in clumps. In sets of three in a row. Whatever. But it means we need more cards so we can offer the same safety and security across jobs. And that means more cards. 

I always assumed that 128GB cards would be enough to handle most big photo files until I bought a medium format digital camera. The camera is "only" 51 megapixels but each raw file is something like 121 megabytes. Those files add up quickly. All of a sudden, even for still photography work, the 256GB cards are looking better and better. 

And it's only a matter of time before I move from a 47 megapixel SL3 to a 63 megapixel SL3, even more sensible would be an upgrade from the Fuji 50Sii to one of the 100 megapixel medium format cameras. So even with still imaging the higher megabyte capacity cards and higher speeds represent an attempt to do some short term future proofing. 

As Kenneth Tanaka wrote in one of this comments (at theOnlinephotographer) it seems pretty inevitable that high end cameras will more and more follow Leica, Zeiss and Hasselblad's leads and start incorporating high capacity (1TB, 2TB,+) SSDs in their cameras and then just offering one card slot of some type or another for file transfers. When that day comes we'll have lots and lots of SD cards to play with. Maybe they'll end up being used for project file storage. Or maybe they'll just get passed along as we trade in the older gear. Hard to know. 

For now I'm loving the SD cards. Sure, twenty years ago we had failures using various cards in early Fuji cameras. And then there were cards that just wouldn't behave in early Sony A7 series cameras. Occasionally you might accidentally pull a card out of a camera that is still writing and corrupt the card that way. Once a card shows me an error message I pretty much lose my faith in them for client work. And fun stuff I care about. I relegate those cards for use when just walking around shooting mannequins and skyscrapers to annoy people. Stuff that wants to be erased pretty much right after it's shot....

I laughed when I read Mike's very serious and complete run down of the state of the art of SD cards for no other reason than that we must be on some similar wavelength; some frequency of the universe that the two of us are tuned to. Why? Because the day before his column came out I had just ordered (and am auditioning) four ProGrade 256GB V90 cards from B&H. They arrived today. Right now you can buy them in twin packs for only $351. What a bargain!!!

Which brings me to another interesting difference between hobbyist card users and hard core working photographers. The idea that memory cards are "expensive." Many of Mike's commenters talk about buying cards as cheap as $10 each --- or even less. Or about holding on to cards for decades at a time; ostensibly to save money. 

I wonder where are these people were during the film years. How did they survive? I looked back into accounting ( business tax returns ) to see what our highest film and process expenses were in the "good old days" before $10 memory cards were even an idea for most people. My accounting adventure took me back to 1995. It was a bountiful year for work. Working across three formats and with the inclusion of lots and lots of Polaroid test materials. In that year I spent something close to $50,000 on film, processing of the film, and some scanning of the film. Included in that amount was Polaroid test material for two of the three formats. Sure, clients reimbursed me for the bulk of it but I'd estimate that I still spent thousands of dollars out of pocket to feed my personal work. Film for fun, self-assigned stuff. 

When I compare five figures of expense in order to capture images in a year with a few hundred dollars of memory cards that can be used over and over again for two, three or even five years the idea that SD memory is now expensive seems humorous to me. That the prices of ever cheaper memory cards are now considered an impediment to practicing the craft is... bizarre and "pound foolish." 

New cards are better and are getting even better than ever before. Having more capacity is always better than less capacity; no matter what camera you use to generate the images. 

My buying habits and use cases seem a bit extreme --- even to me sometimes. But my recollection of how the photo businesses used to work mollifies me a bit. After all, if I spend $1,000 on memory cards this year to do the work I want to do I am saving something like $49,000 1995 dollars on what are basically expendables. 

Go out right now, today, head over to MJ's site. Click through to B&H and buy yourself a really, really good, over the top, SD card for your favorite camera. Go crazy. The feeling of NO CARD LIMITATIONS will feel great. Spend a couple hundred dollars on a card and I can pretty much guarantee that you'll keep much more careful track of its whereabouts than you will a $10 card. Really. 

Big vacation this Summer? Two 256GB cards, backing each other up, should just about do it. And if you aren't doing video it's A-Okay to go with the V60 cards. They'll likely do just as well. 

I'd put a link here if I did affiliate sales stuff but I don't. Mike does and he's a good guy. Go there, read the articles first. Laugh a bit about the endless desire to save a few bucks and then use his links to go a bit nuts and get the card your camera really wants. It'll thank you for that.