ACCESSORIES
Andy Westlake tests an affordable and speedy memory card
● £60 - £235 ● pny.com/en-eu
ALMOST all current cameras use SD cards, but when choosing one to buy, it’s easy to get lost in the confusing alphabetti spaghetti of speed ratings and classes. As a result, it can be difficult to work out why you might select any particular card, rather than a cheaper or more expensive option. Even when you know exactly what you’re looking for, PNY’s EliteX-PRO90 might be seen as too good to be true, as it has a super-fast rating at a fraction of the price of brands such as SanDisk or Lexar.
Available in 64GB, 128GB or 256GB sizes, this card declares its credentials up front, with read speeds up to 300MB/sec and write speeds up to 280MB/sec clearly written on the packet. This is essentially as fast as any other SD card, and should enable both extended high-speed bursts, and shorter write times before the buffer is cleared.
The card also complies with the V90 video class, which equates to a sustained write speed of 90MB/sec. In principle, it should support 8K video, or high-bitrate recording at lower resolutions.
To achieve such speeds, the card employs the UHS-II standard with two rows of contacts rather than one. It can still be used in cameras that have UHS-I slots, but you’re unlikely to see any real-world benefit compared to the fastest UHS-I cards, which will be much cheaper. However, it will transfer files more rapidly to your computer when paired with a UHS-II card reader, and that might prove useful.
I tested the PNY EliteX-PRO90 card using the CrystalDiskMark benchmarking software, which returned maximum read and write speeds of 266 and 221MB/sec respectively on my Windows 11 laptop. This is as near as makes no difference to my results from o
