Recommendations for SDHC card?

N

naveenmedia

Active member
Does anyone have a recommendation for a quality SDHC card? Prices seem all over the place.

Just an example:

B&H has a SanDisk 32 GB for $198.99 (before a rebate).

Meanwhile, they offer a Transcend 32 GB for $53.51.

Both Class 10, though the write speeds are different.
 
I can vouch for Transcend cards. They're cheaper and have never failed on me yet! Sandisk is mostly paying for the brand name. I think the main thing the sandisk has over Transcend is the Sandisk software.
 
I found a good review of quite a few SD cards here. It looks the the Transcend is well-rated, and when you consider it's price, seems like the best buy (though the Lexar and SanDisk Extreme are faster, especially in write speeds).
 
Of the cards I have used over the years, Transcend has failed more than any other card. I have had 2 separate cards go dead, and one other that started giving me errors before I stopped using it. I still use a couple of Transcend cards that have been fine so far, but not for any paid work.

I have not met anyone yet who has had a Sandisk Extreme card go bad (not to say that they don't ever go bad, just that I have yet to find someone who has experienced it first hand).

I have also used Kingston and Patriot cards. I have had no issues with Kingston, and I had one Patriot card go bad (although that was right after trying to use a Transcend card reader to copy the files, so it could have been the card reader that messed something up I suppose).
 
illusiumd said:
Anyone use A-Data? Customer award on Newegg....
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211245&cm_re=SDHC-_-20-211-245-_-Product
Click to expand...
Be careful of the fact that most of their customer rating could/would have come from the average consumer with a point-and-shoot camera.

I have had three cards in my short digital career. A 1GB SanDisk, a 4GB Presidents Choice, and an 8GB Fidelity. The PC card failed with the lock switch falling off (never buy one of those cards!!!), the Fidelity is still going (It's the newest, though performance is starting to lag, even though I format it regularly), and the SanDisk is superior to them all in regards to build, quality, and performance. It's also the oldest. :D

As I'm planning on stepping up into the DSLR world of video in the not-to-distant future, I am going to go with SanDisk, as though they are more expensive, like markblasco said, you very rarely hear of one failing. :)

That's my point of view. :)
 
I got the Transcend yesterday. Oh well, we'll see how it goes. $55 but I'm not shooting anything critical right now so if it fails I'm not losing anything meaningful.

I have a PNY "Professional" Class 10 card right now -- my T2i regularly stops recording; I presume it's write-speed issues.

@markblasco - Yes, you do get what you pay for. As a friend of mine from high school would say "Low price. Buy twice."
 
i stressed a lot over this question before finally going with a bunch of the transcend cards mentioned in the above post with the link to amazon. i paid 31.99 each at teh time. did not have any problems with them yet. i am not saying tha tmemory cards never fail, but i have seen something good and something bad about every brand out there, except maybe for the EXTREMEs. A lot of problems can be avoided by careful card management. i suspect that ther eis a lot of operator error generating bad reviews I read somewhere that formatting too often shortens the life of the card. So i got into the habit of just clearing files after the first use, and then reformatting every OTHER time. not sure if that helps or not, but it seems to make sense. i do think you need to reformat once in a while in order to keep the card from getting fragmented. reformatting (at least in the HMC150) is faster than deleting files, but since it might cause a longevity problem, i dont do it all the time. HOWEVER, if you think about it, you really should be using brand new cards for each new paid job. If we were using tape or film, we would certainly need new stock for each project. If you were to budget 150 dollars for a handful of 16GB cards that could end up giving you 30 or more hours of footage by the time you go through them all 4 or 5 times, you are still way ahead of the game compared to buying that much tape or film. That is being super conservative, but im just saying that we shouldnt complain if a card fails after several dozen passes.
 
Not to dig up a dead thread but I thought I'd just report back that I finally tried out my Transcend, and at least so far it is working like a charm. It seems to start recording almost the moment I hit the record button (there was a longer lag time with the PNY), and so far NO interruption in recording. I recorded for 5 1/2 minutes straight -- something my PNY wouldn't ever allow.
 
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