Also great
*At the time of publishing, the price was $44.
64GB SanDisk Extreme PRO
The SanDisk Extreme Pro is a little faster than our pick, but worth buying only if it’s on sale or our pick is sold out or more expensive.
Also great
*At the time of publishing, the price was $30.
64GB Transcend W60MB/s
The Transcend is slower than our other picks, but it costs about half as much and is still fast enough to shoot 4K video.
Who should get this
Most cameras and camcorders require an SD card in order to store photos and video. SD cards can also be used for expanded storage in devices like laptops, some portable scanners and ebook readers (though not any of our picks for either device), the (old) Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL, and the Wii U. Check your device to make sure you need an SD card (not a microSD card) and that your device doesn’t already come with one that works well enough.
If you already have an SD card that does everything you need, you probably shouldn’t upgrade. Our pick isn’t leaps and bounds better than anything that’s been available for the past few years. But if you need another SD card, or you’re having issues with the speed of your card—say, you burst-shoot photos in RAW format or want to shoot 4K video and your card can’t keep up—you should get our pick.
How we picked and tested
All the SD cards we tested.
The most important features of an SD card are speed, reliability, price, and warranty. SD cards are most commonly used in cameras for storing image and video files as you shoot them. Because most cameras can take photos faster than they can write them to storage, images are first saved to a small but speedy buffer in the camera. Once the buffer is full, the images have to be written to the SD card before you can shoot any more photos. The faster the host device can write data to the card—the card’s write speed—the faster this buffer clears and the sooner you can start shooting again. So write speed is the most important spec for SD cards.
Read speed is important when copying data from the card to a computer via SD card slot or USB 3.0 reader, and when reviewing photos on the camera. Read speed is not as important for cameras as write speed, but because read speed is often faster, manufacturers like to brag about it on the label. Read speed is more useful for SD cards used for additional storage, since you’ll mostly be accessing media that you’ve already put on the card. Almost every SD card we tested in early 2016 had an average read speed of around 92 MB/s, with little variation between cards.
An SD card holds the only copy of a photo between the time you take it and when you copy it to a computer for editing.
Keeping these criteria in mind, we researched SD cards from SanDisk, Lexar, Samsung,Toshiba, Transcend, PNY, and others. Unfortunately, the sources we’ve relied on in the past to help us choose which models we test—like professional sports photographerChuck Steenburgh and Tom’s Hardware—no longer review lots of SD cards. So we tested more cards this time: 10 in all.
We tested the 64GB versions of the SanDisk Extreme, SanDisk Extreme Plus, SanDisk Extreme Pro, Samsung Pro Plus, Lexar 633x, Lexar 1000x, Transcend W60MB/s,Transcend W85MB/s, PNY Elite Performance, and Toshiba Exceria UHS-I.
We tested each SD card’s real-life burst-shooting performance on two entry-level DSLRs (the Canon Rebel EOS T4i and the Nikon D3300), a mirrorless camera (the Olympus OM‑D E-M10), and a compact camera (the Sony RX100 MKIII). We tested with a variety of cameras because an SD card’s performance can vary from camera to camera based on memory controllers, image processors, and a slew of other factors—the fastest card in any one camera won’t necessarily be the fastest in every camera. For each card, we averaged these test results to get an overall measure of performance.
Using a USB 3.0 card reader in a 2015 gaming laptop’s USB 3.0 port, we ranCrystalDiskMark, a benchmarking program designed to test sequential and random read and write speeds on solid-state storage. (We tested SD cards via USB 3.0 to prevent bottlenecks, since USB 2.0 tops out around 33 MB/s and the cards we tested are faster than that.) Between each test, we cleared the cards and reformatted them using therecommended utility from the SD Association to stabilize performance.
Our pick
64GB Samsung Pro Plus
The Pro Plus is one of the fastest SD cards we tested for the price.
The 64GB Samsung Pro Plus is fast enough to shoot 1080p and 4K video, has some of the fastest transfer and in-camera speeds we tested, and is reasonably priced. It’s made by a reliable manufacturer and comes with a 10-year limited warranty. The Pro Plus wasn’t the fastest card we tested—that would be our runner-up, the SanDisk Extreme Pro—but at its usual price of around $40, it’s the best card you can buy without spending at least 20 percent more.
Our pick, the 64GB Samsung Pro Plus.
In our real-life burst-shooting tests, in file transfers, and in benchmark tests, the Samsung Pro Plus was among the fastest of the 10 SD cards we tested. The Samsung Pro Plus is a Class 10, U3 card, which means that the card is fast enough to record both 1080p and 4K video. Samsung advertises the card at 95 MB/s read and 90 MB/s write, but we found the card’s speeds to be a little slower in our tests. CrystalDiskMark clocked the card at 91.5 MB/s read and 84.9 MB/s write.
Write speed is the most important factor for SD cards, and the Pro Plus had the second fastest, behind the pricier SanDisk Extreme Pro. As a result, the Samsung Pro Plus is one of the speediest when transferring photos and video from the SD card to a computer. That means less time waiting around for files to transfer, and more time to spend organizing and editing. All 10 of the cards we tested had read speeds between 90 MB/s and 93 MB/s—they were basically indistinguishable from each other in real-world use.
The Pro Plus had the second-fastest sequential write speeds in this test.
We also tested each card’s real-world burst-shooting speed using four cameras. For this test, we recorded the sound of the shutter closing as we shot a burst of RAW images. The resulting waveforms give us a visual representation of each card’s speed. The large group of spikes at the beginning of each waveform represents a burst of shots, which fill the camera’s buffer and must be written to the SD card before you can shoot more photos. Each spike after that is a single shot, and between those spikes the camera is writing files to the SD card. (Click here for a more detailed explanation of how SD cards affect burst speed.)
We tested the top SD cards in the Olympus OM‑D E-M10 by recording the sound of their shutters snapping in burst-shooting mode. Shorter intervals indicate faster shot speed, and therefore better performance.
We also tested the cards in an older Canon Rebel EOS T4i. Shorter intervals indicate better performance.
Once we averaged the results of this test across the four cameras, the Samsung Pro Plus had the second-fastest average practical write speeds, behind the SanDisk Extreme Pro. The SanDisk Extreme Plus ranked third, followed by our budget pick, the Transcend W60MB/s, and then the Transcend W85MB/s. The SanDisk Extreme was the slowest in every camera we tested.
