Best SD Cards for Canon Mirrorless: EOS R5, EOS R6, EOS RP

Camnostic has been conducting testing for more than 20 common SD cards on the market, looking at actual speed in each camera body. These speed tests show that the ratings printed on the card are not only a poor indicator of performance, but that individual cards – even within the same brand – exaggerate real-world performance by different proportions. Also, a card that does poorly on one camera model may do well on another model. The upshot: it’s chaos.

This article is the second story update as we collect more data. The first, concentrating on the Canon EOS R5 SD card performance, was published in late October. We anticipate a third update to be published in two weeks, including figures for Sony, Panasonic and Nikon bodies as well.

Here are the results organized into a single chart to choose the best card for your body, or if – like many – you shoot multiple Canon bodies, you can see which ones are optimized across models. The thinner bars represent how many RAW shots you can take in thirty seconds, long after the buffer is filled. The wider, white transparent bar shows the price per megabyte of the respective cards.

The best deals appear to be the Prograde 300 MB/s 256 GB card and the Delkin Power 128 GB cards, both showing top performance across all three bodies and costing less per GB than the other top tier cards.

Most manufacturers provided cards for testing at no cost. Camnostic sends the cards back after all the tests are completed for the bodies chosen. The Angelbird card, which shows relatively poor performance in these tests, is likely a bad card, and we are seeking to source a different copy of it to retest. A recent YouTube review of that card showed it performing well in its class. [Update: Indeed, Angelbird sent us a new pair of cards, and we saw a 40 percent improvement over the original ones tested. Those numbers are reflected in the graph above and the table below. Angelbird support is among the best seen in the industry.]

Lexar cards, while tested, are not recommended as it has some customer service issues stemming from US sanctions against its Chinese parent company Longsys.

Canon R5, R6, RP Best SD Cards