Recently, a user on Sony Alpha subreddit reported an issue with his a7 III when a SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB SDXC UHS-I Card is inserted. They were looking for an advice from fellow Sony users, but as it turned out – many more of them have had the same issue with the same memory card type.
Lessons from losing a week of photos to memory card failure
Summary: One of the photographer’s greatest fears is to lose a significant chunk of images from a big trip or event. In this long-form article, find out how a memory card failure caused a week of photographs to disappear, what I did to try to recover them via software, then physical data services, and the valuable lessons, counter to common knowledge, to be learned about memory cards, dual card slots, and backups to prevent such a nightmare scenario from happening to you.
Sony says goodbye to write-protect tabs with new “Tough” line of rugged fast UHS-II SD Cards
One of the biggest failings off SD cards is their physical durability. SD cards falling apart is a probably bigger cause of death and image loss than file corruption. Sony plans to fix that with a new line of SF-G series “Tough” SD cards.
Nikon’s getting into the memory card game with Nikon branded XQD cards
This is a little strange and surprising. Nikon appears to be making their own memory cards now. Or, at least, they’re rebranding somebody else’s if not making them themselves. A new listing has shown up on the Nikon website for a Nikon 120GB XQD card. It’s listed as coming at some point during September 2018.
Lexar will return to “full product” this autumn
Since Micron sold memory card brand, Lexar to Longsys in China, people have been wondering what’s going on. Will they still keep making those favourite Lexar products? Will they bring out a new range? Or will they just take Lexar’s intellectual property, apply it to other products and not make memory cards at all?
Well, now it seems that we have our answer. Longsys has put out a statement saying that Lexar will be back in “full production” and shipping globally by the autumn.
PSA: Fake SanDisk memory cards are everywhere, including Amazon
It seems the fakes are out in force again at the moment. I’ve seen a number of posts across Facebook and other social media where people have ordered SanDisk and other SD cards only to receive counterfeit cards. These days, we need to be vigilant with memory cards.
Memory cards are made to varying degrees of quality, and these forgeries are often whatever’s cheapest. There’s no quality control, because there’s no backlash on them. The last thing you want in the middle of an important shoot is to lose all your work. Or, worse, your client’s work.
Do you really need to safely remove your drives?
I’m sure you’ve been warned plenty of times that you should eject your USB drive or memory card before removing it from your computer. But admit it, do you actually do it? In this video, Linus Sebastian of Techquickie discusses if you should really safely remove your drives, and when it can be absolutely necessary to do it.
Lexar has run out of XQD cards – no more until Summer
When Longsys acquired Lexar from Micron last September, it threw the storage card world into disarray. What was happening to all of Lexar’s products? Were we still going to get support? And what about XQD? Well, it seems when it comes to the last one, Lexar might not have been telling us the whole truth since it went under new management.
B&H switched the status of Lexar XQD cards over to “discontinued” in October. Lexar publicly announced via Twitter back then that they will continue to produce XQD cards and fulfill the B&H inventory “in a few weeks”. Well, it’s now 6 months later, they’re still listed as discontinued. Now, according to Nikon Rumors, Lexar is telling us to wait until the summer. But they may not be back even that soon.
ProGrade Digital will not make XQD, will focus on CFexpress
I was hoping that new memory card company ProGrade Digital would give photographers some good news about XQD at some point. And this simultaneously isn’t good news, but it also sort of is. ProGrade Digital have confirmed that they are not going to be pursuing the XQD memory format, which isn’t going to make some Nikon shooters happy. They are, however, working toward XQD’s successor, CFexpress.
CFexpress is backwards compatible with XQD – if the device manufacturer allows it – but with much faster transfer rates. This means that while there won’t officially be a ProGrade Digital XQD card, there should be XQD compatible storage coming at some point. That is, assuming Nikon updates the firmware in the D500, D850, D4, D4s, D5 and any other XQD bodies they may produce.
Sony sets up in competition with itself with new high-performance CFast cards
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. At least, that seems to be the sentiment offered by Sony as it announces a new range of pro CFast memory cards. It’s a surprising move, given that CFast competes directly with XQD; A format that Sony had a hand in developing along with SanDisk (who don’t make XQD cards) and Nikon.
The new “G Series” memory cards are aimed at meeting the needs of demanding photographers and videographers. With read and write speeds of up to 530MB/sec and 510MB/sec respectively, these cards should be able to handle just about everything thrown at them. At least for now.
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