SD cards

gbpackerbacker

I have a new D3200 camera and want to buy the right SD card. I was looking at SanDisk and was wondering what the differences are in the extreme pro, extreme plus and the ultra plus. Is there ever a problem of a computer being able to read them?

ohyeahar

All of them won't have any issues with being read by any PC. The difference is in write speeds.
I wouldn't bother with anything over 95MB/s on your camera. Even that may be overkill.
Do you shoot in continuous mode in RAW? If so, then you will benefit from a faster card.
If you mostly shoot single shots or in JPG, then any Class 10 card will be fine.

bruto

According to my dealer, the highest video resolution requires class 10. For single shots, even in NEF, you probably can get away with just about anything.

If you rarely shoot continuously, card speed is little concern. The camera's buffer will hold about 9 NEF shots. At that point, card speed becomes important because buffer overrun will stop the camera from shooting at all. If you never outrun the buffer, you never see a problem. You can throw a class 2 card in for landscapes, but you'd better have a faster one for whales, sports, and active babies.

If you want an idea of how fast works for you, put the camera on continuous mode, and fire until it stops. The time between this and the card light going off again is how long it takes for the buffer to empty.

PBked

The price of SD cards is so low these days that I don't see an issue in buying one. A class 10 card of any reputable make such as Sandisk, PNY or Lexar will serve most needs. The 'Extreme' range is supposed to be optimized for video. All I will say is that I think it is better to double up ie. 2 x 8gb instead of 1 x 16gb or 2 x 16gb instead of 1 x 32gb. The reason for this is practicality and born out of experience. If one card develops a fault, then you have a second to allow further filming. If all your data is confined to 1 card and it fails, then you have lost the lot.
Regards,
PBked

bruto

I agree with the above. I like having several cards available in case of failure, filling up, or just so that you can organize things better. An 8 or 16 gigabyte card holds a lot of images, and you should be copying them often to a hard drive anyway. Keep an eye out for sales and check out reputable discounters like B&H.

By the way, if you shoot a lot especially, make sure that you reset the menu option for how files are numbered, so that the count goes up to ten thousand before it repeats, instead of restarting every time you start a newly formatted card. This avoids duplicate numbers and helps keep track of images and avoids accidental overwrites and erasures of files with duplicate numbers.

I found the numbering system especially helpful on trips where I've taken literally thousands of pictures and had to try to keep them organized on a hard drive. I did my initial card dumps to individual folders each day, but later found it very easy to copy them all to a single folder without conflict, and also to spot gaps in the sequence.