Why buying the absolute fastest memory card is often a waste of money
Plus: New GoPro cameras, 100MP street photography, DaVinci’s new RAW photo editor, and HEVC video support is dropping
Today’s photos were all taken with the Fujifilm GFX100RF medium-format camera. I have more on it below.
Why you don’t actually need the fastest memory card for your camera (probably)
This might sound a bit odd coming from someone who has invested a lot of time and money in speed testing memory cards, but the reality is that your camera probably doesn’t need the fastest memory card you can buy.
Memory cards are getting more and more expensive all the time. Lately, demand from the AI industry has been pushing the price of flash memory up, which is in turn driving memory card prices higher.
But you’re going to need memory cards for your camera — you’re not going to be taking many photos or shooting much video without one. This is a place where smart buying can save you real money. The key is to not overbuy.
A fast memory card sounds like a good thing. And it is. But you don’t necessarily need the absolute fastest memory card on the market.
You just need a card that’s fast enough for your specific camera. Sure, there are cameras where you do need that blazing fast speed for high-bitrate 4K or 8K video or long RAW bursts. But most cameras just don’t.
If you buy a card that outpaces your camera’s internal tech, it will still work — backward compatibility is built in with most memory card standards. But it also means that you’re paying a massive premium for bleeding-edge speed that your camera physically can’t take advantage of.
So it’s important to first take a close look at your camera’s specs and requirements. If your camera has a UHS-I SD slot, putting a more expensive UHS-II card in it will not give you any better performance in the camera. And if your camera only needs a V30 SD card, there’s really no point forking out the big bucks for a V90 card.
There’s a reason, after all, that I’ve gone to quite a lot of effort to put together my memory card recommendations for specific cameras. Because anyone who gives you blanket advice to just buy the fastest memory card you can is just wasting your money.
What you want instead is a memory card that’s fast enough.
There is, however, a partial exception. I have more on that on the website.
News
Don’t expect memory card prices to come down anytime soon. If you need memory cards, prices are only headed in one direction at the moment. The latest to increase their prices is Prograde Digital; they’ll be increasing prices in May in response to industry-wide higher costs.
GoPro has announced three new higher-end 4K and 8K cinema cameras. They’re aiming for “low-cost, compact cinema cameras” rather than photography, but they’re an interesting development nonetheless. They have GoPro’s own new GP3 chip and a much larger Micro Four Thirds sensor. I bet the Top Gear/Grand Tour crew would have loved to have these available.
Lightroom update. The April 2026 update adds background processing for tools like Denoise, better intentional shallow depth of field in assisted culling, and new camera RAW format support for the Sony A7V.
Video + now photo. DaVinci Resolve is known as one of the top-tier video editing apps. Now they’ve added RAW photo processing as well. But they’re not just copying Lightroom — they bring their own powerful color grading and editing tools to the party. Given how little effort Adobe has put into Lightroom’s video tools, this looks like a really smart move from Blackmagic Design to try to become the go-to tool for more content creators. The core version is free (you want the DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta version); some of the more advanced tools will require a subscription.
Something to watch if you shoot video. Behind-the-scenes legal battles over video codec licensing are quietly impacting the hardware we use to shoot and edit. HEVC has been widely adopted in many cameras for several years, but litigious patent holders are pushing many manufacturers to look elsewhere, and some major computer manufacturers have already dropped hardware decoding. So it’s at least conceivable that you might have trouble editing and playing all that video footage you’ve shot in the past decade or so. The newer AV1 codec has some advantages as the next-generation codec, but its downside is that it requires more advanced hardware to encode and play.
Seeing in the dark. Scientists at NYU have come up with a new, less expensive, and less toxic way to create infrared sensors. It could be interesting for true infrared cameras one day, or even extending low-light capabilities of regular cameras.
Updates & Hot-Take Mini Reviews
I’ve been using the Viltrox WCL-X100VI wide-angle conversion lens on the Fujifilm X100VI lately. The X100VI has a fixed 35mm lens; this add-on lens creates a 28mm perspective. And it’s less than half the price of the Fujifilm version. Here’s my take on it.
I’ve been shooting with the Fujifilm GFX100RF, a medium-format fixed-lens camera. There’s a lot to like about it: 102MP images, superbly sharp lens, overall excellent image quality, and small enough to be a walking-around camera. But there’s also enough to give me pause, especially it’s limitations in the kind of mixed lighting you get in street and travel photography. But if you like a slower, more deliberate style of photography and want super-high resolution, it’s a fun camera to shoot with.
And I was shooting with the Nikon Z 85mm f/1.2 S at the cherry blossoms recently. It’s really designed as a portrait lens, and there are good reasons not to use it for travel-style photography (mainly, it’s big and heavy). But it was a fun experiment in very narrow depth of field and low-light shooting.
Photographers at Work
It’s French food, but not as you know it. Truck-stop diners seem like a distinctly American thing. But French photographer Guillaume Blot has spent six years capturing the disappearing world of roadside diners of provincial France. He has now compiled some of the shots in a new book.
