The Amazon Prime Day deals are well underway as we enter day 2 of the sale, but unlike past years, there are relatively few deals on memory cards. This reflects the current global shortage of flash memory, which has brought about relenetless memory card price rises since the start of the year. But it's not all doom and gloom! I've searched Amazon even harder than usual and have managed to find some Prime deals that stand out.
Unlike past Prime Day events, I'm not going to list numerous different brands and capacities the same card format, as there simply aren't that many good deals right now. Instead, I'm giving you the single best deal I can find for each card format - SD, microSD and CFexpress (Type A and Type B).
Here are my top memory card Prime deals:
Best SD (256GB)
Best SD (512GB)
Best microSD
Best CFexpress Type B
Best CFexpress Type A
There are a few things to consider when shopping for a memory card. First and foremost is the type of card. The SD format is the most widely adopted standard, and these are further split into SDHC (High Capacity) and SDXC (eXtended Capacity) variants. All my picks are SDXC cards, which enable greater capacity than the other variants.
Then there are microSD cards, which are much smaller and commonly used in physically smaller devices, such as drones and action cameras.
CFexpress is the format adopted by pro-level equipment - most use Type B cards, but Sony mirrorless cameras use Type A cards. The best CFexpress cards offer blistering read/write speeds, but this performance comes at a price – though not too steep a price, thanks to the deals I've selected!
Capacity is the next consideration. Simply put, the greater a card's capacity, the more images (or video) it can store. However, it's not always best to go for the highest possible capacity; many photographers prefer to split their images over several cards for safety. There's often a sweet spot of capacity and price, and the deals I've picked reflect this.
Next comes performance, which measures a card's read and write speeds. The former determines how quickly you can download images from the card to the computer, but the latter is more important as it dictates how fast data is written to the card and thus affects the burst rate of your camera when shooting a rapid sequence of stills or the resolution and frame rate of the video it is capable or recording. If a card can't keep up with the camera, it will grind to a halt as it struggles to write data to the card.
Last but not least is the brand. All cards are great until they fail, and while no card is completely fail-safe, investing in a trusted manufacturer of memory cards offers a greater guarantee of reliability. All the brands that make my list are tried and trusted brands.
How to choose
