Sony Xperia Z5 which MicroSD card for 4K recording?

Michael Trenton

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Feb 4, 2015
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Hi,
I just bought a Sony Xperia Z5 Compact, but I also want to purchase an additional Micro SD card so that I won't run out of storage space as I tend to shoot a lot of video.

My question is what kind of Micro SD card will I need to utilize this phone's 4K recording capabilities? What minimum write speeds, classification etc will I need?

 

Michael Trenton

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Feb 4, 2015
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Thanks! I feared I would have to cash out on a class 10 card, but I guess it's better to be safe than sorry right?
I did manage to spot a Kingston 64GB MicroSD Class 10 UHS-I 45MB/s Read Card + SD Adapter that was quite cheaper than the card you suggested, so I guess I might go with that one. Apparently the write speed of the card is 10 MB/s which should be sufficient to handle the Xperia Z5's 7,5 MB/s bitrate right?

Gotta say on a general note that the memory card speed requirements for some cameras are a bit baffling to say the least. I purchased the Sony RX100M4 compact camera last year due to its 4K capabilites. The camera shoots 4K at a 100Mbps = 12,5 MB/s. Now I had a couple of Sandisk Extreme Pro SDHC Class 10 UHS-1 cards already from my previous camera. Now those cards are rated as having 95MB/s read and 90MB/s write speeds so they should be more than capable of handling recording video in a 12,5 MB/s bitrate right? No such luck. The option to record 4K was all greyed out and unavailable to me because the cards weren't rated as SDXC, only SDHC. And so I had to go out and buy brand new expensive SDXC rated cards just to record 4K with that camera. Weird.

Anyway, thanks. :)
 

Michael Trenton

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Feb 4, 2015
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Thanks. Even though it cost slightly more than the Kingston card I ended up ordering the Samsung EVO MicroSDXC Class10 UHS-I 64GB card as it is rated with an up to 20MB/s write speed just in case. :)