# D800 and sd cards



## zamanakhan (May 29, 2012)

I have a ton of sd cards, but obviously I am going to have to get some cf cards for the d800 as well. I am wondering how others shoot in this situation, use sd cards for slow situations and cf for fast, or shoot cf all the time, and then backup whatever is on the cf and clear cf again and same thing all over again, basically shooting cf cards for speed then using sd for storage. How much worse is the ad compared to cf? I just cannot believe how much the price difference is, I know it's faster, but it's also 4x as big, I thought in technology the small stuff is more expensive.


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## cgipson1 (May 29, 2012)

I have a 32GB CF... and a 32GB SD (both Sandisk Extreme Pro's). It takes about a second to format the CF.. and about 6 seconds to format the SD. I use the CF for RAW, and the SD for JPG (I usually shoot both, and it will let you separate it that way.) Since the RAW's are so large, it kind of evens things out transfer wise.


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## lemonart (May 30, 2012)

I'm planning to do (if/when I get my 800), CF as primary, SD as mirrored backup.

Lem


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## Vtec44 (May 30, 2012)

I'm with CGipson, CF for RAW's and SD for JPEG large.


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## zamanakhan (May 31, 2012)

Vtec44 said:


> I'm with CGipson, CF for RAW's and SD for JPEG large.


I never shot Jpeg, so it didn't really occurred to me. Maybe I will do more Jpeg with the d800 seeing as how the raw files should be massive


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## Vtec44 (May 31, 2012)

zamanakhan said:


> Vtec44 said:
> 
> 
> > I'm with CGipson, CF for RAW's and SD for JPEG large.
> ...



I do it on the slower secondary SD card as a backup.  The write speed is much slower if I mirror both of them, as the SD card slows down the overall process.  On my D7000, I just mirror them.


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## cgipson1 (May 31, 2012)

Vtec44 said:


> zamanakhan said:
> 
> 
> > Vtec44 said:
> ...



Ditto!


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## ronvanderkolk (Jun 4, 2012)

CompactFlash historically offered much higher capacities, faster transfer speeds and a better price/capacity ratio than SD cards but at the cost of a larger size. The D800 supports both, so it is now a matter of personal preference and availability. Note that many users seem to have problems with Kingston cards in the D800.

Read more info: Nikon D800/D800E video tricks - What memory card type do I need for recording a movie?


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## zamanakhan (Jun 4, 2012)

ronvanderkolk said:


> CompactFlash historically offered much higher capacities, faster transfer speeds and a better price/capacity ratio than SD cards but at the cost of a larger size. The D800 supports both, so it is now a matter of personal preference and availability. Note that many users seem to have problems with Kingston cards in the D800.
> 
> Read more info: Nikon D800/D800E video tricks - What memory card type do I need for recording a movie?



its not just a matter of preference, cf cards unquestionably offer higher transfer speeds. For a camera with a raw file of 75mb this is a big bonus, i will definitely have to get at least one cf card if i want to do any sort of full burst shooting.


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## KenJulio (Jun 6, 2012)

I'd recommend to conserve space, to write files as compressed LOSSLESS, which will reduce the size to almost half.  There could be additional processing taking place to compress the file, but it will not take as long as swapping a memory card


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