SanDisk Extreme Pro vs Lexar Professional 600x

Tested on a D5200 in Manual mode with manual focus, ISO 100, 1/100 shutter, f/5.6, RAW.  High ISO noise reduction and distortion correction were on.

Both cards are 32 GB models.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro allows for 21 shots in 10.0s, and takes another 13.8s to finish recording those.

The Lexar Professional 600x takes 11.4s for the same 21 shots, and another 14.0s to finish recording those.

I didn’t experience any stuttering in shots when using the SanDisk Extreme Pro, but did encounter one instance of stuttering – a fairly minor one – with the Lexar.  I have not previously seen either of these cards stutter, neither in tests like this nor in real-world use, so I think it’s a rare anomaly.

In both cases you can get only four shots at the advertised continuous shooting speed, at which point it slows down to a steady pace – the SanDisk maintaining a ~10% faster pace than the Lexar; ~1.8 vs ~1.6 FPS.

The difference between the two cards is much less significant than between either of them and e.g. the SanDisk Ultra line.  The SanDisk Extreme Pro seems to have a slight advantage, and is roughly the same cost as the Lexar, so I’ll give it first place, but in reality I’d be – indeed have been – happy using either of these cards, and haven’t noticed a practical difference.

Note: these aren’t the same settings I previously used to compare the Lexar Professional 600x to the SanDisk Ultra, nor the same camera body or lens.

Update: using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test the SanDisk scores 63.6 / 86.3 MB/s, for write and read respectively.  The Lexar gets 41.0 / 84.6 MB/s.  Using a 15″ 2012 Retina MacBook Pro.  That’s about the difference I expected based on their specs and advertising.  That you don’t get a 50% faster continuous shooting speed in a real camera doesn’t surprise me – I doubt the camera can always meet the bandwidth capacity of a high-end card, nor that there aren’t other bottlenecks waiting right behind SD write speed anyway.

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