In my post comparing the Nikon D850 and D500 for bird photography I mentioned the buffer of the D850 as a potential issue for longer burst sequences. At that stage I hadn’t had much opportunity to assess this. Using my standard 128Gb SanDisk Extreme Pro 95Mb/sec cards and backing up to a Sony XQD card I hadn’t run into any real issues even with flight sequences so hadn’t explored faster cards or just shooting to the XQD card. After a bit more experience using the camera I can update my opinion of memory cards for the Nikon D850. This is simply my hands on impressions from using these cards in the field for bird photography.

For an upcoming trip I was looking at getting some extra cards but balked at the price of the faster 300Mb/sec cards. Interestingly I found a couple of second hand cards available through one of my regular photography retailers which were great value and just what I will need for my trip. One of these happened to be a 128Gb SanDisk Extreme Pro 300Mb/sec card which I spent a week using while photographing Fairy Terns. These tiny rare birds are a challenge so when you manage to get one close enough and framed, prolonged bursts are the order of the day to try and get a good image. Once the fast SD card was full I overflowed onto the XQD and had no issues with a full buffer with either. When both were full I switched over to a 256Gb SanDisk Extreme Pro 170 Mb/sec card and immediately noticed a difference, hitting into a full buffer and having to wait for it to clear. From what I have read online it seems that the 170 Mb/sec cards are not appreciably faster than the 95 Mb/sec Extreme Pro cards. From a practical perspective using the cards, the 300 Mb/sec cards are significantly faster allowing more shots before the buffer fills. 

For most uses the cheaper 95 or 170Mb/sec cards are perfectly adequate but if you are needing to shoot prolonged sequences the 300Mb/sec cards have a definite advantage. My standard setup now will be to use the fast SD card backing up to the XQD. This gives me 128Gb of storage which is enough for a busy day. 

My experience only includes SanDisk cards as I use them exclusively. I have previously used SanDisk and Lexar CF cards (and a 2Gb Hitachi Microdrive which was massive back in the day with a Nikon D70). I ran into trouble with a pair of Lexar 32Gb CF cards in my Nikon D3s. Occasional files would be corrupted and errors showed with a card testing program. I never lost any images as I always shot with 2 cards set to backup and the same file was never corrupted on both cards. I contacted Lexar who replaced both cards but the issue persisted until I replaced them with SanDisk cards. I’m not sure if it was a card batch issue or an issue peculiar to the D3s but since then I have just stuck with SanDisk Extreme Pro cards which have never given me a problem.