Nikon Z7 II Tested for Best SD Card Choice

Jan 4, 2021 | Accessories, News, Nikon, Reviews

We had a Nikon Z7 II in the Camnostic office for a few days, so we opted to put it through its paces, and among those paces was a test of a stack of SD cards to see which ones appeared to perform best with it. The upshot: the faster Delkins, Prograde Cobalt, Sony and SanDisk cards performed at a level above all the others when thinking about how many stills pictures can be taken before things slow. From a bang-for-buck perspective, it was hard to beat the Delkin Power or the ProGrade Cobalt. Lexar factors closely, but has warranty issues in some cases due to trade sanctions

Below is a chart in blue of how many frames can be taken by the Z7 II (uncompressed RAW) in 30 seconds. Superimposed on that (in orange) is the cost per megabyte as measured at B&H in the fall, prior to holiday deals.

You can see the two different levels of performance: those cards that use UHS-II contacts and those that use just the UHS-I contacts. As is often the case, there are some exceptions that tend to be camera-model-dependent. In this case, the Toshiba Exceria Pro looks like it was functioning as a UHS-I card, perhaps indicating a firmware or other incompatibility with the ZII and it’s UHS-II compatibility. We happened to have two of these cards on hand, and both performed in the same fashion.

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