Leica SL3 - CFexpress vs. SD cards

[loverofthelight]

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Hi everyone! 

Would like to ask does anyone have experience with comparing those two cards? Is CFexpress better only for video recording (Probably you can shoot higher resolutions?), or you also have some benefits while taking photographs? Maybe better / faster reading while shooting in a burst mode? 

Many thanks! 

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[hoolyproductions]

AFAIK there is no real benefit when taking photos. Maybe in burst mode (but usually the camera itself is the rate limiting factor here, I don't know for sure). The main benefit comes when transferring to a computer (assuming you have a sufficiently fast card reader), where much faster speeds are possible. Having said that I use Lightroom which anyway takes a while to render the previews before you can work on them, so I'm not sure that makes a significant difference in practice - unless for some reason you need to dump the photos really fast to the computer. e.g. when on the move.

Others please correct me if I am wrong, this is my understanding from what I have read.

 

[malbooth]

Hi, FWIW, I took my SL3 to Japan recently for a bit over two weeks (with just the SL Summi 50mm ASPH). I probably shot about 2,500 images and was downloading to my laptop & Lightroom so I could do basic locations and descriptions every night. I was using a 512 GB Sandisk Extreme Pro CFexpress card that was 1700 MB/s read and 1400 MB/s write speed. I was not deleting the originals (DNG, full resolution) from the card and found everything to be 100% reliable and very fast. There is still a lot of room on the card and it was reassuring to come home with two copies on an SSD and the CF card. I didn't need to use the spare SD cards at all. I didn't do any burst shooting and not many long exposures, but sometimes took a lot of photos in a very short time without a problem. The whole thing was a bit of an active learning experience for me with the SL3 as it is a bit different to the SL2 and obviously the Q2. I did learn a couple of useful things about the SL3, but I won't bother people with them here as they're not directly related to this topic.

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