 Alright, today I'm really excited to talk to you about something that I know we've all been waiting for. Alright, all jokes aside, I know that talking about memory cards isn't very exciting, but if you're a digital photographer, there's only one thing almost just as important aside from your camera and lens, and it's your memory card, because without memory cards, we're not taking any pictures. So I want to talk to you a little bit about memory cards, because recently I went to pick up some memory cards, and it's amazing to me how many different types of memory cards are out there, different speeds and things like that, and so I wanted to kind of decode all of the little icons that you see on these memory cards and kind of give you an idea as to what they all mean, what types of cards there are, and maybe which one is the best one for you. So let's first start by talking about what are some of the different memory cards out there. So first of all, for most of us, there are three types of memory cards. We have CF cards, which stand for our compact flash cards. Those are the big, giant, bulky square cards that you see a lot of pro photographers or pro cameras taking these days, but more consumers, the average consumer at least in the average consumer cameras, take a second type of card, which is the SD card. And I did a little bit of digging to find out what the hell SD even meant, because in all honesty, I really didn't know, and SD stands for secure digital. And then you have the third option, which is the micro SD card or the little mini SD cards that you see out there. A lot of people use those for things like GoPros or smaller cameras and things like that. So those are the three that we have at our disposal. Those are the ones that you're going to use most of the time. But aside from that, which are the best cards for you and what the hell do all these other things mean? So I've broken this down into three categories. There's basically the capacity of the card, which is what we're going to talk about first. How much storage can your memory card hold? And this comes in a range of sizes. I remember eight gigs was pretty popular than 16 gig cards. Now you're seeing more 32 gig, 64 gig and even larger cards like 128 gig card. I saw on B&H the other day for $40, which is just insane to me that much storage and how cheap it is. But on average, I mostly buy 32 to 64 gig cards. There's a couple of reasons for that. One reason is the smaller the card, usually the cheaper it is. The second reason is I don't want all of my pictures going on to one card. That's a little dangerous in my opinion because memory cards go bad. And so if I've taken my entire vacation on one memory card and it were to die, then I basically just lost everything. So do yourself a favor. Buy smaller cards. You'll save yourself some money. And if a card does go bad, you won't lose it all. Now, while the capacity of a memory card is important and also kind of obvious, the next thing maybe necessarily isn't. And that's why we're going to talk about it. So what we're going to talk about now is the X speed. And the X speed of a card is basically how fast the information, whether it's a photo or a video, is going to get written to the card. This is also known as a read and write speed. And depending on the type of photography that you're doing will depend on the type of speed at which you might need for a memory card. In other words, if you're taking pictures of flowers one at a time, you don't need this speed to be very fast. But if you're taking pictures of sports or fast moving objects or things where you're taking a lot of pictures really, really fast, you might need a card that writes fast. So let's talk about the X speed because this is a little confusing. Card manufacturers show this in a couple of different ways. So one way that you might see it is a number like 633X or 1000X, something like that. That's the X speed. You might also see this as a displayed as megabytes per second like 95 megabytes per second or 150 megabytes per second. And even though the card manufacturer is showing one or the other, and some card manufacturers actually show both on their card just to confuse you even more, the numbers are the same. In other words, if I have a card that's showing me 95 megabytes per second and or 633X, that's exactly the same. Now, I know that some of you techie left brain thinkers out there are already trying to figure out what the hell this even means. So I'm going to talk to you for a second. Basically, the way they figure this out is that the letter X equals 0.15 megabytes per second. So if I take 633 multiplied by 0.15, then you get 94.95 megabytes per second. 94.95 doesn't sound as sexy, so they basically just rounded up to 95 megabytes per second. Again, the math is take X multiply by 0.15 and then you get your megabytes per second. Now, I'm not a techie thinker, so all of that math is a little bit too like, I don't really want to get involved in that. I'm a right side thinker, right brain side thinker, and I like things a little bit more easy. So basically X equals performance. How the card is going to perform the higher the number, the better the performance. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about the next category, which is the speed class, which is different than the X speed, the speed class. Now the speed class is actually broken down into two different types of icons that you'll see on the card. The first one is something that you will see it kind of looks like a letter C or a half circle, and then you'll see a number on the inside of this icon. And basically this is the minimum right performance for the card. And usually this is more dedicated towards video recording. And if you ever see the letter C with the number 10, 10 is the highest class or the fastest speed that is out there. So if you see the letter C with a 10, you know that that's going to be good. There are smaller number amounts, but the letter C 10 is pretty common in most cards these days. The second type of speed class is actually something that you're going to see also a couple of different ways. It's either a UHS number or it's a letter U with a number. I'm going to talk about the UHS first. So you have two classes of UHS. You have class one and class two. And basically the different classes relate to different megabyte speeds. So a UHS one is 104 megabytes per second speed. A UHS two equals 312 megabytes per second of right or minimum right performance on a card. So that leaves the U code, which the U code you either have U1 or U3. And again, these are minimum right speeds. So a U1 equals 10 megabytes per second and a U3 is 30 megabytes per second. That becomes pretty easy to remember. Just remember U1 is 10 and U3 is 30. It makes sense to me. It might not make sense to you, but when you see it displayed, now you know what the different speeds are. And again, so if I go back to the UHS codes one and two, usually the higher these numbers are, these are really good codes. If you're something who again is doing a lot of high performance shooting, or maybe like we're doing right here where we're shooting video, if you're shooting something that's higher than high definition or HD, like 4K video, a lot of cameras are doing now, you're going to need a card that actually can perform good when recording 4K video. So you're going to need a card that has a higher UHS code. Typically UHS 2, you're going to be just fine. Now, since we've spent all this time decoding the three different things, we've talked about the capacity of the card, the X speed of the card, and the speed class. Now that we have all that out of the way, and we know what these different icons mean, what's the right card for us? And we've kind of hinted on that throughout this thing. And basically, I would say that if you're shooting a lot of high burst rate type stuff, then you're going to want cards that are going to perform better when you're shooting more stuff. You're going to want higher rate speeds. But if you're kind of a slow, methodical, casual user, you don't really need cards that are going to write super fast. And if you're not doing crazy amounts of video or high level video like 4K video, then again, you don't need these high performance cards. You could stick with class 10, which is pretty standard, and keep these other UHS or U codes or X speeds relatively inexpensive for yourself. Save yourself some money and just buy these kind of standard cards. Now, as I said at the start of this video, the cards that we had picked up recently, I got two 32 gig cards with excellent X speeds and speed class. And these two 32 gig cards cost me less than $25. So if you're interested in picking up this pack of cards, it's a really inexpensive pack of cards with all great speeds. We'll leave a link down in the description below so you can go ahead and grab these cards for little to no money. Last but not least, we've created a really awesome post over on our blog. Check it out at PhotonerdsUniversity.com where we've listed out all of the things we've talked about today in this video, as well as some other things that you could talk about, whether it's in relation to card readers or storage or how we keep track of these cards, all of that kind of stuff you can find in that blog post. So head on over to PhotonerdsUniversity.com and check it out.