When SD cards were the exclusive province of point and shoot cameras their speed didn’t matter much. But now that they are used in many D-SLRs for main slots, overflow slots, and HD video capture speed has become just as important as with CompactFlash cards. Unfortunately the big price advantage of SD cards has traditionally gone away when you shop for higher speeds. But no more…

Until recently a 16GB Class 10 SDHC card was around $100. But now Patriot is selling them for $45 on Amazon. Patriot isn’t that well known in the card market but they are a long time premium memory maker for computers and warranty their products for life. If you don’t need quite as large a card their 8GB Class 10 SDHC card is only $31.75 on Amazon.

I’ve ordered one of their 16GB versions and will certainly post to our forums on nikondigital.org how it performs. I’ll be using primarily in the “overflow” slot of my Nikon D300S to record mid-size JPEGs (while the NEF files go on the CF card) and more importantly any videos I shoot.