The High-Speed Memory Card Myth

If you upgrade to the latest high-speed Compact Flash or SD memory cards, is it going to really make a difference? Well, honestly, for most folks—probably not. These more expensive high-speed cards are designed for people like serious sports photographers, with higher-end dSLRs, who need to shoot long, continuous bursts of images. The reason high-speed cards matter to them is that they need any images temporarily stored in their camera’s built-in memory buffer to be written to the memory card as quickly as possible to free that buffer for their next continuous burst of shots. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I never shoot that many shots at once,” then there’s good news—you don’t really need one of those expensive high-speed cards. This is good news, because regular-speed cards are much less expensive. For example, I just looked up what a regular 8-GB SD Lexar memory card costs at B&H Photo. It was $9.99. The 133x higher-speed 8-GB card sells for $61.95, but it did come with a mail-in rebate of $25 (however, retail statistics show only a very small percentage of consumers ever actually mail in these rebates, which is why mail-in rebates are so popular), but even with that, it’s still $36.95—more than 3.5 times as much as the regular-speed card. So, why pay the difference if you won’t experience a difference, eh?