The Nikon D500 has 1 x XQD and 1 x SD memory card slot. The SD supports UHS-II speed which is great news since they offer faster writing speed, but we also recommend you to take a look at even faster XQD cards.
You’re probably going to use the D500 for action photography (sports, wildlife etc.) and/or 4K video, which is why a fast card is a must. Otherwise, you’ll miss most of your shots waiting for the buffer to clear.
Best Memory Cards for Nikon D500
- XQD – Lexar Professional 2933x XQD
- XQD – SanDisk G-Series XQD
Best SD Memory Cards:
Our top pick: If you want the best performance from an SD card, get the Lexar 2000x UHS-II 64GB. Since the D500 supports UHS-II, you should get a UHS-II card to get the most out of your camera.
It comes with a USB 3.0 reader, downloadable Image Rescue Software and is more than enough for 4K video and long burst photography.
You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.
If you don’t care that much about long bursts and rarely take more than ~20 pictures in burst, you might prefer the SanDisk Pro 64GB (95MB/s). It’s cheap,UHS-I and good for 4K video, but since the Nikon D500 is an action camera, there aren’t many people buying UHS-I cards for it.
You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.
Best XQD Memory Cards
Our top pick: Definitely the Lexar Professional 2933x XQD card. Not only is it cheaper and faster than the Sony below, it’s easily the best memory card for the D500 and any other XQD camera right now.
If you’re all about action photography, you’ll want this card since it can easily take 200 shots (both RAW and JPEG) before the buffer fills. Even then, it’ll only take a small amount of time before you can do it all again. For 4K video, this is also more than it will ever require.
Basically, if you’ve got the money and never want to wait (whether it’s transferring files to your computer, or shooting in burst), get this Lexar card.
You can buy it at Amazon or see more reviews here.
In case the one above is not in stock, the Sony G-Series XQD 64GB is a pretty close card. It’s a little bit slower in both writing and reading speeds and costs more, so the decision is pretty easy.
It also comes in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB sizes but again, we recommend the Lexar if you want the most for your money.
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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