However, why do you hesitate to insert that card into your camera, presumably either a D4 or D4S, since no other still camera takes XQD at this point (until Nikon starts shipping the D5 and D500)? Do the electronic contacts look right? Do you think they may mess up the contacts on the D4 or you think the electronics will affect the camera? If you have a current 15″ MacBook Pro laptop, you’re even more stuck, as Apple abandoned the Express Card slots in favor of a dedicated SD card reader (the 17″ MacBook Pro still has an Express Card 34 slot).Paul, it is difficult for me, and probably for everybody else, to determine whether your XQD card is counterfeit by viewing your image on the web. That means plugging the fast reader into a slow USB 2 port to transfer files, or adding a USB 3 card to your computer. Sadly for us Mac users, the only readers currently available for the XQD cards are USB 3.0 or Express Card 34. The good news is that if you have a USB 2.0 slot on your computer, you can still use the USB 3 reader, albeit at a much slower transfer rate. USB 2.0 is stuck at 480Mbs… just over half the speed of Firewire 800. USB 3 can theoretically deliver 5Gbps per second… that’s faster than eSATA. The speed difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 is immense. Sony’s XQD card readers are USB 3.0, with USB 2.0 backwards compatibility. You may as well shoot video if you want to do that. That’s a lot of frames! Of course, most photographers don’t find themselves ripping off 80 frames at 10fps most of the time. In my testing with the XQD card I was able to shoot 83 14-bit lossless compressed NEFs in the D4 before the buffer filled and shooting speed dropped. Sony’s spec states 125MB/s transfer rates are possible. The new XQD standard promises very fast data throughput. My Nikon D4 included a free 16GB Sony XQD card and reader. The Sony XQD card and reader (left) compared to Compact Flash

Sony xqd card reader not working