Like some of the best SD cards, the Transcend 64GB SDXC 700S is rather unassuming and doesn’t make quite as many bold claims about its speed on the packaging. Nonetheless, it still managed to outperform all the other cards in our roundup, and even exceeded the speed claims it did make. Who bullied this card? Clearly Transcend is in need of a confidence boost. The Transcend 64GB SDXC 700S makes good use of the UHS-II standard (distinguishable by a second row of pins on the rear of the card) by providing fast write and read speeds that manage to handle the 4K recording demands of most cameras on the market today. Let’s see how it performed.
Design: Unexceptional
The Transcend 64GB SDXC 700S comes with a black sticker with a red banner on the top featuring Transcend’s name. The gold text underneath highlights the core features of the card: Class 10, U3, V90. For those unfamiliar, Class 10 guarantees 10 MB/s write speeds, U3 guarantees 30 MB/s write speeds, and V90 guarantees 90 MB/s write speeds. Welcome to the redundant world of SD standards.
Setup Process: No sweat
The Transcend 64GB SDXC 700S doesn’t require anything in the way of formal setup, but do make sure that you are using it in devices with UHS-II support. UHS-II is kind of like USB 3.0—it will still work in a USB 2.0 port, but you will only get USB 2.0 speeds.
Performance: Middle of the pack
The Transcend 64GB SDXC 700S turned up pleasantly surprising numbers in our benchmarks, slightly exceeding their own advertised claims in one test. There are faster UHS-II cards on the market, but we were happy with the results we saw. In CrystalDiskMark’s sequential write speed test, using a 1 GiB write test over 9 repetitions, the Transcend delivered 186 MB/s speeds. Not bad for a card that advertises 180 MB/s. In Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test, however, we only managed to squeeze 151 MB/s out of it. As for read speeds, the Transcend registered 240 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark, and 251 MB/s in Blackmagic’s test. These were the highest read speeds we saw during the course of our SD card roundup. Overall these are impressive numbers out of this card. It’s enough to confidently record 6K footage using the RAW 5:1 codec (144 MB/s) in Blackmagic’s Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, which is no small feat. It would also be able to easily handle any codec and configuration in Panasonic new Lumix S1H camera.
Price: UHS-II sweet spot
Transcend 700S vs. Lexar Professional 2000x 64GB SDXC UHS-II Card
Transcend makes light work of this card, which not only costs significantly more, but also underperformed in all of our tests compared to the Transcend. Lexar does sweeten the deal by providing a UHS-II card reader along with the card, making it still a good deal under certain circumstances. The Transcend 64GB SDXC 700S performed admirably in our tests, and doesn’t cost too much either. If you know you need UHS-II speeds, or you just want to future-proof your storage a bit, this is a great pick.
