Best Equipment

Best Memory Cards for Canon 5D III

The Canon 5D III has 1 x CF and 1 x SD memory card slot. Here’s a list of our most recommended cards to get the optimal performance.

For burst shooting and Full HD video, you’ll want a good memory card or you’ll experience delay due to the buffer not clearing too quickly.

Our favorite memory card is the SanDisk Extreme PRO 64GB. It’s super fast (95MB/s) and affordable, plus SanDisk is the most reliable memory card company out there.

Best Memory Cards for Canon 5DIII

Best SD Memory Cards:

sandisk-extreme-pro-64gb-sdxc

Our top pick: Your best SD choice is the SanDisk Pro 64GB (95MB/s). It’s cheap, super fast excellent for bursts, RAW shooting and videos. I don’t recommend you to get the 128GB version because it’s safer to store your images on a few smaller, separate cards.

You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.

If you want even faster transferring speeds, you should get the Lexar 2000x UHS-II 64GB card.

It’s around 3x faster than even the fastest UHS-I card when it comes to image/video transferring, and depending on your work this may very well be worth it, especially if you shoot thousands of images weekly. It’s also 3 times as expensive as the SanDisk above and won’t be any faster in-camera (since the 5D III makes all cards “act” as if they’re UHS-I), so you’ll have to decide if the extra reading speed is worth it.

Oh, you also get a free USB 3.0 memory card reader to achieve such speeds.

You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.

Best CF Memory Cards

lexar-professional-1066x-64gb

Our top pick: CF cards have around 20MB/s faster writing speed on the D810 (~95 vs 75). The Lexar Professional 1066x 64GB is is hands down the best memory card option, with ~95MB/s average writing speed, and a lower price than SanDisk’s card.

You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.

sandisk-extreme-pro64gb

The SanDisk’s Extreme Pro 1066x 64GB is more expensive and offers the same speed, but they’re mostly known for their memory cards being much more reliable in extreme temperatures and conditions than other brands. The card was tested at extreme cold and hot temperatures, and also features silicone coating for better shock and vibration protection.

You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.

Don’t buy memory cards from unknown brands or something that looks too good to be true. More often than not, those cards will fail right when you’ll need them the most.

A memory card is where all of your work is stored until you transfer that on the computer.

Make sure to get a card from any of the following brands: SanDisk, Lexar, Transcend and Kingston. There are a few good out there, but the 5 we mentioned are more than enough.

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