Best Memory Cards Leica M11 – Real Benchmarks

The Leica M11 can take v90 UHS-II class memory cards, but you can’t just use any memory card since the camera has some compatibility issues with some brands.

I’ve benchmarked all the most popular memory cards to help you find the best memory cards for the Leica M11.

Available At: Amazon / Adorama / B&H

Leica M11 Review

Best SD Memory Cards Leica M11

What You Need To Know

The Leica M11 has a single memory card slot that supports v90 UHS-II memory cards up to 2TB in size. The camera also has 64GB of internal memory. 

You can configure the camera to use both JPG or DNG to write to Internal Memory or to the memory card, or set one as overflow or backup. The Internal memory is a little bit faster than the fastest UHS-II V90 memory card at 123MB/s. Fastest we get from a card is 106MB/s (Delkin Black).

Many UHS-II v90 Cards are not working properly in the Leica M11. Here are the recommended cards.

I would go with Lexar, Sony, or Delkin as my top choices. The Leica M11 usually has older hardware and doesn’t really take advantage of the full potential of V90 cards and many of the V60 cards are performing close to the same as v90 cards. If you wanted to save some money and buy a massive v60 card, like the Lexar 1800x, you would not see any significant decrease in performance.

Note: Sometimes the Sony Tough cards are a little thicker and if you like taking the card out of the camera for transfers, then they can sometimes be difficult to pull out. Also, transferring memory from the card with an external reader is quite a bit faster than plugging the camera into LR and transferring directly from the camera. I personally just plug the camera in.

Recommended Memory Card – Fastest SD Cards For Leica M11

These are the memory cards that were working best in the Leica M11. Most of the v60 cards from any brand also performed well even when their v90 cards didn’t work properly, so when in doubt you can always just grab a v60 card.

My personal top choice would be the Lexar cards, I also like the Delkin cards. You don’t really see a benefit from the Lexar 2000x vs the 1800x, so the 1800x makes a lot of sense and comes in a 512GB for a compelling price.

The Sony Tough cards are a little too thick, but you can buy the Sony M or Sony E card as normal versions and they both work great.

Keep in mind the Sony E card comes in two different speeds based on the size 64gb vs 128gb. Get the faster one (128gb). I no longer test the slower one.

These are the absolute latest Lexar cards from late 2022. Delkin in mid-2022 told me I had the latest cards when I checked with them. The Sony E and M cards I tested are the latest, my Sony G card is maybe two years old.

What Size Memory Cards Are Best

The sweet spot for me is around 128GB, but I don’t shoot backup, I use the internal as overflow and still rarely fill a 128GB card.

DNGs are about 4.5x bigger than JPG files. So if you plan to shoot JPG backup to the internal, and DNG to a memory card, you would max out the internal memory when the total DNG data hit around 288GB. So with this setup about a 256GB card would give you full use of the internal memory when it is set as a JPG backup.

Leica M11 Memory Card Information

Compatible Cards: UHS-II V90
Max Memory Card Capacity: 2TB
Average DNG File Size: DNG sizes come in at the low end of around 55MB and 95MB on the high end.
Average JPG Size: DNGs are on average 4.5x bigger than JPGs.
Buffer Size: 800MB
Shots Until Buffer Peaks Slows: 20-30 with UHS-II cards. Then performance slows from 4.5fps to around 2-3fps.
Time To Clear Buffer: 5-6 seconds – UHS-II cards
Internal Memory Speed: 123MB/s

Leica M11 Not Running UHS-II Memory Card Properly, Here Is What’s Happening.

The Leica M11 isn’t working properly with many of the new V90 cards, like Sandisk, Angelbird, Wise, Kodak etc. You can see the full benchmark sheet below to see which cards were having trouble. 

This isn’t really the memory card manufacturers’ problem and only the newest cards from these brands are having issues. For example, I tested the older Angelbird cards and Sandisk v90 cards and they were fine.

What I think is happening is many new memory cards are no longer compatible with the legacy hardware the Leica M11 is using. It looks like the Leica M11 is using very old protocols to communicate with the cards. This is a problem we were having when testing the Panasonic GH4 back in the day. The Leica M11 looks like it’s using similar hardware as that 9-year-old camera based on how it’s performing.

Since UHS-I memory cards were also performing very poorly, it seems like the Leica M11 is only using the UDMA 4 mode to communicate with the cards. This puts the cards at around a max write speed of 66.7MB/s per lane. I get around 50MB/s when testing UHS-I cards, so this seems correct.

My guess is that the latest v90 UHS-II cards might just be dropping this legacy communication protocol from the memory controllers and the cards drop to UHS-I speeds, or down to a single lane of data transfer instead of the two, which results in half the speed.

I’m not sure why Leica decided to use 10-year-old hardware for communication with memory cards in a $9,000 dollar camera. It would have been nice if they used modern hardware so we got a faster performance out of the cards.

If this camera’s memory card interface performed like a modern camera, we would be able to shoot with an endless buffer. Instead, you can get around 20 shots before the buffer slows from 4.5fps to maybe around 2 to 3fps. But, not the end of the world considering it only takes around 5-6 seconds to clear the buffer. So all things considered it’s not really a bad setup, but a little unnecessary profit squeezing by Leica and is now causing compatibility issues with users trying to use the best modern cards hoping for great performance. An unfortunate oversite by the Leica engineers. Maybe a firmware fix in the future can clear this up?

Leica M11 Memory Card Benchmarks

To benchmark the camera, I set the camera on continuous shooting High with DNG large at ISO 64 and a shutter of 1/125. Turned off any noise reduction or other features that would require additional processing.

I shot a series of bursts of around 30 shoots each and recorded the data recorded vs the time it took to clear the buffer, which was difficult because the buffer indication light is on the bottom of the camera. Here are the results.

Best Memory Cards Leica M11 Conclusions

If you stick with Lexar, Sony or Delkin you’ll have no issues with memory card performance. A few other brands like Hoodman Steel and Amplim were also running well in the camera, but those generally would not be my top picks unless there are some nice sales going on. Lexar, Delkin, and Sony all have great bundles with readers and are producing the best cards including CFxB, CFxA, and SD. They are the three brands I personally use the most and they have always been dependable.