Kingston recently upgraded its ‘Canvas’ range of memory cards by launching the new Canvas Plus SD and microSD products, which also includes the company’s first UHS-II cards. We received the Canvas Go! Plus SD Card (SDG3) for a review – these cards are capable of 4K and 8K video capture, which makes it a perfect memory card for those looking to shoot 4K and 8K footage at good speeds.
The Canvas Go! Plus SD Card range offers storage capacities ranging from 64GB to 512GB – the variant we received for the review offered 512GB of storage. On paper, the 512GB variant boasts read speeds of 170MB/s and write speeds of 90MB/s. The memory card is ideal for shooting 4K UHD video and burst-mode photography on your DSLR, as it offers U3 and V30 speed performance.
The file storage format it supports is exFAT and the best thing about the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus SD Card is that it comes with a lifetime warranty. Do note, however, that the product lifetime is defined by Kingston as the normal time expectancy for the use of products in the industry.
In order to test the real world performance of the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus SD Card, we ran it through a data dump benchmark. We used an Apple MacBook Pro to conduct the benchmark. The 2GB data dump test folder included Word documents, Excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations, images, movie files, MP3 files, WAV files, zipped files, text files and so on.
The Kingston Canvas Go! Plus SD card recorded 85.2MB/s in write speeds when transferring the data dump from the MacBook to the SD Card. In terms of read speeds, which essentially means transferring the data dump from the SD card to the MacBook, the Canvas Go! Plus SD card recorded data transfer speeds of 167MB/s.
We also ran the SD Card through a 4K random IOPS test using a Windows machine. The IOPS test checks for the number of I/Os per second for requests of 4KBytes of data. This test determines how the SD card will be able to handle 4K footage recording. For 4K random IOPS transfers, the Canvas Go! Plus SD card recorded 2,109.21 IOPS read and 167.13 IOPS write.
The results of the benchmarks show that the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus SD Card (SDG3) is really aimed at professional photographers and videographers who are looking at capturing 4K and 8K footage. The SD card also displayed comparable performance in our 4K random IOPS benchmark.
An asking price of $277 could sound a bit steep for a memory card – but as they say, quality comes at a price. So if you are looking for a dependable and solid memory card that can handle 4K and 8K footage with ease, the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus SD Card (SDG3) could be one of the options you could look at.
Price: $277
