Fuji X-T2, Neewer (7artisans) 25mm f1.8
There's been a lot of sound and lightning online about card slot choice in a number of newer cameras, starting with the single XQD slot in the Nikon Z6 and Z7, and also notable in the choice by Sony to put SD UHS-II slots in the A7RIV and A9II. Folks on a budget don't want to invest in new cards & readers with no backwards compatibility, and folks also don't want to give up dual slots notional reliability advantage, although almost nobody except event shooters ever uses those cards as mirrors. On the flip side, the long waits to clear the deep buffers of modern cameras annoys people, especially in systems where the UI is write-bound (Sony again) and not fully functional when the camera is occupied with writes.
Now XQD is technically superior to SD UHS-II. They're more robust in build and in electronics reliability and they're faster. SD gets backwards compatibility and the wide availability of cheap and good cards if you buy UHS-1 cards which are still fast enough for most non-action uses. It's hard to say no to $30 or less for a 64GB Sandisk Extreme Pro UHS-1 card.
But what nobody has bothered to note is that Nikon's XQD-equipped bodies, usually help up as the standard for write speeds, aren't actually exceeding what SD UHS-II can do. In fact Nikon's XQD bodies perform on par with the demonstrated write performance of similar-cost UHS-II XQD cards (like the Sony Tough cards). Of course Nikon's UHS-II implementations are 80-100MB/s slower, and Sony in particular is barely delivering 150MB/s in their cameras.
The real issue is that the manufacturers have found it cheaper & easier to deliver lousy performance from a faster interface than maxing out what the notionally slower interface can do. It took a very long time before UHS-I cameras actually came near the 95MB/s performance the interface allowed, and we're still stuck at 150-180MB/s in cameras when the same cards do 250-280MB/s write performance in a reader, dead on where the cameras with XQD and early CFExpress implementations can do. And some companies (Sony....cough cough) haven't even bothered to do that.
There's been a lot of sound and lightning online about card slot choice in a number of newer cameras, starting with the single XQD slot in the Nikon Z6 and Z7, and also notable in the choice by Sony to put SD UHS-II slots in the A7RIV and A9II. Folks on a budget don't want to invest in new cards & readers with no backwards compatibility, and folks also don't want to give up dual slots notional reliability advantage, although almost nobody except event shooters ever uses those cards as mirrors. On the flip side, the long waits to clear the deep buffers of modern cameras annoys people, especially in systems where the UI is write-bound (Sony again) and not fully functional when the camera is occupied with writes.
Now XQD is technically superior to SD UHS-II. They're more robust in build and in electronics reliability and they're faster. SD gets backwards compatibility and the wide availability of cheap and good cards if you buy UHS-1 cards which are still fast enough for most non-action uses. It's hard to say no to $30 or less for a 64GB Sandisk Extreme Pro UHS-1 card.
But what nobody has bothered to note is that Nikon's XQD-equipped bodies, usually help up as the standard for write speeds, aren't actually exceeding what SD UHS-II can do. In fact Nikon's XQD bodies perform on par with the demonstrated write performance of similar-cost UHS-II XQD cards (like the Sony Tough cards). Of course Nikon's UHS-II implementations are 80-100MB/s slower, and Sony in particular is barely delivering 150MB/s in their cameras.
The real issue is that the manufacturers have found it cheaper & easier to deliver lousy performance from a faster interface than maxing out what the notionally slower interface can do. It took a very long time before UHS-I cameras actually came near the 95MB/s performance the interface allowed, and we're still stuck at 150-180MB/s in cameras when the same cards do 250-280MB/s write performance in a reader, dead on where the cameras with XQD and early CFExpress implementations can do. And some companies (Sony....cough cough) haven't even bothered to do that.
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