3152014316_96fcf43332_o Recently we ran a poll on DPS asking: What’s Your Favorite Brand Of Memory Card.  The poll garnered an enthusiastic response with over 12,000 votes and over 70 comments.  While the poll is non-scientific and only represents DPS readers, the numbers represent a broad range of photographers, from beginners to professionals.  I read through the comments (yes, I do read all comments on posts I write) to see if they’d help shed a bit more light on the purely numerical results.

SanDisk was by far the most favored, garnering 68% of the votes.  I have been shooting with one brand almost religiously for that last five years and that brand is not SanDisk, so this result seemed a bit lopsided to me.   Digging through the comments from those voted seemed to have a common theme:

  • “Sandisk extreme series give always what they promise: reliability and speed. ” – Nikos
  • “The only reason I’ve used it is because it’s reliable and fast.” – lionking
  • “SanDisk Extreme III in all our cameras. Fast and trustworthy.” – moses
  • “I always use SanDisk for storage, great quality as needed.” – 3afsa
  • “For CF cards, Sandisk – fastest and most reliable cards around.” – D. Travis North

Lexar was a distant second place with 11% of the votes and while there were some comments noting problems in the past with errors, those in support seemed just as enthusiastic as the SanDisk owners:

  • “I used to use SanDisk, but then I was reading Rob Galbraith, and he mentioned Nikon/Lexar optimization, so I tried out the Lexar 300x cards. They’re my primary cards now.” – jdepould
  • “I use a Lexar Professional 2GB 133x speed and have taken over 80thousand images with them, mostly sporting images, and have had not trouble with them if in rapiture mode when doing the bikes. I am a believer that when your on a good thing stick to it.” – david donovan

The remainder of the cards filtered out as follows:

  • Kingston – 10%
  • Transcend – 4%
  • Other – 3%
  • Sony – 3%
  • Adata and Patriot – Less than 1%

In the comments section a fair number of respondents noted the importance of speed and a name brand over being brand loyal.  “My choice really should have been “the reasonably fast one that fit my budget.” It happened to be SanDisk, but the speed and price were more important.” stated Kathy A.  jon echoes her comment with, “I buy based on what’s on sales[SIC] (taking into account the brand, speed and memory size) and now have a collection of panansonic,toshiba, sandisk, kingston, transcend and adata ranging in memory size from 2GB to 8GB.”

The full poll results and comments can be found here.

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