What SD card speed can the Nikon D7000 actually use?
Asked 5/15/2012
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The Nikon D7000 supports UHS-I SD cards, but I want to know the practical write-speed limit of the camera before buying a card. Is there any real benefit to very fast cards like 95MB/s models, or does the D7000 top out well below that in real-world shooting?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
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Rob Galbraith has a full spread of tests with just about every popular card for this camera. To sum up the results, the fastest card is the SanDisk Extreme Pro 8GB SDHC card. It performed at 27.7MB/s JPEG and 26.4MB/s RAW for a burst of 39 shots in 30 seconds. The speed test was performed by shooting 17 JPEG Fine and then 10 NEF files.
More info can be found here: Rob Galbraith D7000 write speed test
The "optimal" card might include price, which varies and goes out of date, so I won't comment on that here.
Originally by user4892. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4892
14y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Real-world tests show the Nikon D7000 does not come close to using the full advertised speed of the fastest UHS-I SD cards. In one widely cited test set, the best-performing card reached about 27.7 MB/s writing JPEGs and 26.4 MB/s writing RAW, with a 39-shot burst in 30 seconds.
So while the D7000 is compatible with UHS-I cards, its internal write performance appears to be limited to roughly the high-20 MB/s range in practice. That means a 95 MB/s card may still work fine, but the camera itself is unlikely to take advantage of that full rated speed for in-camera writes.
A faster card could still help for other reasons, such as quicker transfers in a compatible card reader, but for shooting in the D7000, paying extra purely for very high advertised write speeds may not give much benefit once you’re already at the camera’s practical limit.
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