It’s the largest capacity yet in Sony’s SF-G TOUGH series, and joins existing 32GB, 64GB and 128GB versions. But what makes it so tough, and does it matter?
Sony’s SF-G series TOUGH cards don’t break new performance records, but they are right at the very top end of UHS II V90 SD card speeds, and they are designed to be physically much more resilient than regular SD cards. After all, anyone who’s been using SD cards for any length of time will surely have broken a few.
There are two particular areas of weakness in SD card design. One is the write protect switch on the side, and the other is the thin tongues of plastic between the contacts, and I’ve had to scrap cards for both reasons in the past.
The Sony SF-G TOUGH cards solve both problems by getting rid of them. They ditch both the write-protect switch on the side and the plastic ‘ribs’ between the card contacts.
It doesn’t stop there. These cards use a one-piece molded design 18 times more resistant to bending. They can also survive a drop of 5 metres – though SD cards are so light it wouldn’t have occurred to me that they could be damaged by dropping anyway.
But then what you drop them on to could be a problem, and these SF-G cards are claimed to be “dust, dirt, water, mud and grime proof”. Now that is good news for anyone who’s ever dropped a card on a sandy beach, in mud on a gravel track or into a puddle.
The new card is the highest capacity card in the series, which already includes 32GB, 64GB and 128GB options. Its maximum write speed is 299MB/s, and its video rating is V90, or 90MB/s, which is good enough for all but the fastest frame rates and most demanding codecs in Sony cameras. More recently, of course, Sony has started adding dual SD/CFexpress type A slots to cameras like the Sony A7R V, so at some point video shooters will have to switch to CFexpress Type A cards instead.
All this speed and toughness isn’t cheap, and the new 256GB Sony SF-G TOUGH V90 card costs £470 in UK currency.