With it’s single SD card slot, 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.
Recommended Memory Card For Leica M11
The Leica M11 has some compatibility issues with some SD cards here are a few recommendations for only the best cards.
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.
Here are your best Options
Delkin Black V90 was the fastest card hitting a speed of 106MB/s in-camera, based on my in-camera speed test, they also have a tough build and are great cards and one of the best brands you can buy.
Lexar 2000x V90 UHS-II cards also performed very well hitting speeds of 99MB/s in-camera. Lexar is also one of the best brands of memory cards for their reliable performance.
Lexar 2000x UHS-II V90 128GB SD Card
The Lexar Professional 2000x UHS-II SDXC memory card comes in sizes from 32GB to 256GB.
Tested Write Speed: 228MB/s
Tested Read Speed: 256MB/s
Rated Sustain: 90MB/s
Warranty: Limited 10-Year Manufacturer Warranty
See Details: Lexar 2000x UHS-II V90 Review
The Lexar 1800x memory card is a great value as a v60 card. It hit speeds of 93MB/s in the Leica M11, and with the v60 speed class you can get a much larger card at a much cheaper price.
Lexar 1800x UHS-II V60 128GB SD Card
The Lexar 1800x UHS-II SDXC memory card comes in sizes from 32GB to 256GB.
Tested Write Speed: 188MB/s
Tested Read Speed: 255MB/s
Rated Sustain: 60MB/s
The Sony M Card performed almost just as well as the V90 cards while in-camera speeds of 99MB/s. You can save yourself quite a bit of cash by going for one of these cards and the few MB/s in performance drop won’t make any difference in real-world shooting. The only issue I’ve had with these Sony Tough cards is they are a little thick and can sometimes be difficult to get out of the Leica M11. So if you find yourself pulling the card out regularly to download your footage instead of going through the camera USB-C, this might not be your best choice.
Sony M Tough V60 UHS-II SD Card
The Sony M Tough V60 UHS-II memory card comes in sizes from 64GB to 512GB.
Tested Write Speed: 153 MB/s
Tested Read Speed: 269 MB/s
Rated Sustain: 60MB/s
Warranty: Limited 5-Year Manufacturer Warranty
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 a capacity of 2TB. 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 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. The 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 take full advantage 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 large v60 card, like the Lexar 1800x, and you would not see any significant decrease in performance.
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 – You can also see USB read and write stats with the SD Memory Card Speed Tests.
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 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. With that bottleneck v60 memory cards are really the best value for the Leica M11.
Leica M11 Available At: Amazon / Adorama / B&H
Check out my Leica M11 Review, to learn more about the M11.
Also, check out my list of the best Leica M11 Accessories and the list of all available Leica M lenses.
