Best cards for 5D MIV

[Aestar]

I've seen a bunch of misleading info online as to what the best CF Card and SD card is for this camera. Is Lexar the best brand? I saw a couple people purchased some of these but said they didnt fit the camera.

[RobertTheFat]

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@Aestar wrote:
I've seen a bunch of misleading info online as to what the best CF Card and SD card is for this camera. Is Lexar the best brand? I saw a couple people purchased some of these but said they didnt fit the camera.

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Most of the cards that I use on all of my cameras are "Lexar Professional". They always seem to work.

I don't think there is any "best brand". Another brand that everybody seems to swear by is SanDisk.

The most important thing is to avoid counterfeits. Buy only from highly reputable vendors.

[ebiggs1]

"Buy only from highly reputable vendors."

This is key.  I use Lexar and Sandisk. I use Transcend, too.  All work great.

[wq9nsc]

I use a lot of both SanDisk and Lexar cards which are both fine but as noted avoid the common counterfeits.  Buying from B&H is safe but avoid that place named after the big river in Brazil 🙂  And don't try to use any of the micro version plus adapter SD cards because that adds great potential for lowered reliability.

A CF card will give you slightly better performance in your 5DIV (in terms of how fast it can clear the buffer after a sustained high speed burst) but also consider the mechanical design of the card electrical connections and it is far easier to damage the pin socket used for the CF card compared to the more mechanically robust SD style socket.  Keep that in mind if you frequently remove/insert cards for file transfer. The CF interface is reliable but one wrong move (or a counterfeit card with improperly formed pin openings) will result in a bent pin and an dead camera with a potentially expensive repair bill.  For my 1DX family I leave the cards in place and do all file transfer via the gigabit ethernet port rather than chance damage to the card/socket.

Of course both style cards are available in a wide range of speeds with the very fastest SD cards exceeding the capability of the SD interface in the camera.  I believe that the best of the SD card performance can beat the best of the original CF interface cards but the SD interface in Canon cameras (at least the 5 series) can't take full advantage of the fastest SD cards and this is what gives the better CF cards a slight advantage in your camera.

I picked up a 5DS R a few months ago and I have both CF and SD cards in it but the only time I have had it write to the CF card was when I was seeing how it did with sports; the 5DS was OK for sports but I am definitely sticking with my 1DX family of cameras for that use.  But the difference between a very fast CF and a very fast SD card was noticeable shooting bursts.  I have found the small form factor of the 5D family surprisingly convenient at times and it will get more use than I originally expected.

Rodger

[rs-eos]

There's actually often a "best" list since manuals from vendors such as Canon sometimes contains what cards they actually tested with.  

At a minimum, the equipment specs will list out what cards (class, UHS I vs II, etc.) will work.   If a card wouldn't phyiscally fit, then the user bought the wrong card.  There are now many types out there to include Compact Flash (CF) and SD/SDHC/SDXC, but also SD micro, CFast and the newest CFExpress.

Personally, I've been using SanDisk for ages now.  In my 5D IV, I'm using SanDisk CF 128 and 64 cards along with SDXC of the same size, U3, class 10, UHS1 but rated at 95 MB/s.  I haven't yet tried the 170 MB/s ones (should work in theory since they are still U3, Class 10, UHS1.

Other thoughs... one of the reasons I am moving to the higher-speed SDXC cards is that my card reader (either on the LaCie external RAID drive or iMac Pro) may allow for faster file transfers from those cards.  And the 170 MB/s rating is now nearly matching the CF rating of 160 MB/s.