A reader asked me a good question yesterday: with the proliferation of card formats (XQD, CompactFlash, Secure Digital) which should they invest in?
Unfortunately it's a trick question. Anyone looking backwards will tell you that card formats/abilities aren't secure enough for long-term investment. Had you bought a bunch of state-of-the-art cards five years ago, today's cameras would all perform less than optimally with them. If you're a deliberate, slow-paced, one-frame-at-a-time photographer, that might not be a big penalty, but if you're thinking about current and future performance, old cards should be retired.
Unfortunately, Nikon has completely garbled (and will continue to garble) the whole subject with their lineup of cameras. Simply put:
- D4 — You bought the camera for performance, and the clear winner here is XQD cards. At the moment you get one free with the camera, so it's easy enough to compare it with your best CompactFlash card. I'll bet the XQD card wins every time.
- D800 — A trickier battle, but CompactFlash wins for still performance, at least if you have the state-of-the-art (1000x). The SD side of the camera, despite being UHS-1 compliant, doesn't match the CompactFlash side performance with state-of-the-art cards (1000x CF, 95MBs SD). Exception: video, where I'd tend to use SD.
- D7000 — dual SD basically made all the upgraders junk their CompactFlash cards for Secure Digital cards.
In essence, there's no consistency in Nikon's lineup or thinking, and I don't believe we'll have any more consistency with the next couple of models being introduced (other than SecureDigital is the choice for lower end cameras).
But again, it's a trick question. You sacrifice ultimate performance if you use cards from your two-year camera in your new camera because write performance is consistently moving upwards. A different way of putting this is: buy a small number of new state-of-the-art cards with your new state-of-the-art camera. For me, that meant buying 3 XQD cards and some new CompactFlash for my D4, and some new SD cards for my D800 (I can use the CompactFlash I bought for my D4 on my D800). Even when the card slot is the same as what you've got (say a D3000 user moving up to a D7000), you still should look at the state-of-the-art in card performance at the time your new camera was introduced and buy a couple of those. That advice is even more important if you're one of those that ever fills the buffer.