Memory cards

You may need to upgrade your card collection when you start to shoot raw files

Raw files use lossless compression or are uncompressed. This means that you can squeeze far fewer of the bigger files onto a memory card than you can with JPEGs. But as it’s really not worth compromising on quality to get more images on a card; larger-capacity cards are generally the order of the day when you shoot raw.

Take the Nikon D850, for instance: with a 64GB XQD card in the camera, you can shoot 589 14-bit raw files (at 51.6MB each) or 1,900 Large, Fine Quality JPEGs (at 22MB each) before the card is full. That’s more than three times as many JPEGs, which share exactly the same resolution as the raw files and will still offer excellent quality!

Card capacity isn’t the only consideration; with today’s cameras combining higher resolutions with faster continuous shooting speeds, it’s important that a card can save large amounts of data quickly. If you shoot 4K movies with your camera, the transfer speed is certainly a vital consideration. Your camera’s manual will detail the recommended sustained write speed to cope with the copious volume of video data.

More advanced cameras have a dual memory card slot that can be configured in a number of ways. While you can simply have the second card set up as an ‘overflow’ that you only use when the first card is full, you can set the second card to be an instant back-up of the main card. Or, if your camera lets you record raw files and JPEGs simultaneously, you can save raw files on one card and JPEGs on the other.