Capacity of a Lexar Silver 256gb CFexpress B memory card in my D850

G

Gonzalez49

New member
Following my recent successful updating of the firmware in my D850 I am now able to use CFexpress memory cards. (Thank you to the forum members who helped me with that!)
I currently have a Lexar Silver 256gb card in the camera, plus a 16gb SD card in the second slot. In the photo shooting menu I have selected Lossless compressed NEF (RAW) compression in the NEF(RAW) recording tab and NEF (RAW) +jpeg normal black star in the image quality tab. Primary slot selection is XQD card slot.
My understanding was that the capacity of the 256gb CFExpress memory card is very high, much higher than my previous 64gb XQD card. Thousands of images, indeed! But in the top screen of the camera there seems to be only a capacity of 744 images, which is only 100 more than the XQD card.
Am I misunderstanding something here, or are there other selections I need to make in camera's menu? Grateful for all explanations!
 
Needa

Needa

Senior Member
Challenge Team
What is your secondary slot function set to? Overflow? Did you format the XQD card in camera before use?
 
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BF Hammer

BF Hammer

Senior Member
Maybe change the recording to Raw in primary slot, jpg in secondary.

If you set the secondary slot to backup the primary, your limit in capacity (and write speed) is that 16GB SD card. Since jpg files are much smaller in size than Raw, splitting the file types to write on the 2 different cards won't slow you down too much. Or consider buying a bigger and much faster SD card for doing the straight backup if you really want that.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
I use the same setting BF suggested in my Z8. Raw files go to the CF express card, and I have a 256 GB SD card (relatively inexpensive) set to jpg. I can shoot for months without transferring or erasing the jpg files on the SD card. It's nice to have a RAW backup, but I can live with having a full sized JPG in the off chance that something happens to my RAW files.

Note: if you are shooting a lot of high speed strings and fill the buffer often, try turning off the backup to the SD card. I run into that from time to time when shooting birds in flight. Turning off the SD backup seems to help. I could do a test run and verify that, but haven't taken the time to do it. I've just relied on my impression while shooting.
 
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