Canon Rebel T3i / EOS 600D Memory Card and SD Card Recommendations

The Canon Rebel T3i — sold as the EOS 600D outside North America and the EOS Kiss X5 in Japan — doesn’t come with a memory card as standard. So unless you’ve picked up a retailer bundle that does include the card, you’ll have to buy one separately.

The good news is that because the T3i is an older camera and memory card technology has been progressing in leaps and bounds since it was released, you don’t need a particularly fast or fancy memory card by current standards. That means you don’t need to fork out the big bucks for the latest and greatest and fastest memory cards out there.

But you still need to get a good one. Some are more reliable than others, and there’s a surprising number of counterfeits around.

Quick recommendations

Here are some quick recommendations for those who just want to cut to the chase.

You might sometimes see this camera referred to as a T31, with a numeral one in place of the letter “i”. The correct model number is T3i.

But it’s not even that simple. The camera has different model numbers in different parts of the world. In Japan, it’s the EOS Kiss X5. In the United States, it’s the EOS Rebel T3i. In other parts of the world, it’s the EOS 600D. All refer to the same camera — the differences are just in regional marketing model numbers (although warranties and battery chargers can differ). There’s also an EOS 60D, which is a different camera.

Canon T3i SD Card Compatibility & considerations

The Rebel T3i’s manual isn’t particularly helpful in giving information on what kind of memory card works best. It only includes a few scattered references to the memory card, mentioning that it will work with SD, SDHC, and SDXC memory cards. But that’s not especially illuminating.

For capacity, the camera officially supports SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards. When it was released, 128GB was the standard upper limit, and those are still a good choice — cost effective but still fitting plenty of photos. But because it supports the SDXC standard, you can also use 256GB and 512GB cards if you’re after much more space.

One card type to avoid is SDUC, and it’s also worth skipping SD Express cards — both are newer standards this camera’s SD slot wasn’t designed for, and even though SD Express cards are backward compatible, you won’t gain any speed benefit and may even see slower performance than with a regular card.

So what I’m trying to do here is cut through the jargon and provide some practical recommendations for what memory card to get so you can get out taking photos and shooting video with your T3i.

My priorities here are cards that not only work well in the T3i but are a combination of being reliable, readily available, have a good selection of memory sizes, and are good value.

There’s no point buying a high-end, super-fast, and expensive memory card because the T3i can’t take advantage of those — so I’m not including them here. I’m also not including every single card that will work in the camera.

Memory card manufacturers release new models of memory cards all the time. And because of the way the market works, sometimes these newer and faster cards can be cheaper and more readily available than the older, slower versions. That’s why some of the ones I’ve included here can end up being quite a lot faster than the minimum requirements of what the camera needs — but they’re likely also a good combination of value and availability. I’ll do my best to keep this list updated.

A natural question is what size to get. For most users, the range from 64GB to 128GB is likely to be a good choice in terms of cost and convenience. Many of these now come in memory sizes from 64GB up to 512GB or even 1TB, and they’ll all work in the T3i, so choosing between them basically comes down to the convenience of not running out of space to take new photos or shoot new video.

One thing a bigger card won’t fix is video clip length. The T3i writes movie files with a 4GB ceiling, which works out to roughly 11 to 12 minutes at 1920×1080, and it stops recording when a clip hits that — it doesn’t roll on into a second file the way later Rebels do. There’s also a hard 29 minutes 59 seconds limit per clip. Both limits are per clip, not per card, so you just press record again to keep shooting.

So here are some recommendations for SD cards for the Canon Rebel T3i.

Other brands

Some of the other brands that make very good memory cards are Kingston and PNY. Toshiba used to belong on that list, but Toshiba Memory was renamed Kioxia in October 2019, and Kioxia says its consumer cards are no longer sold in the United States, so Toshiba-branded cards you still find here are old stock. There are also a lot of smaller, mostly unknown brands. In general, I’d recommend sticking to a brand you know and trust or one of the brands I’ve mentioned on this page because they have well-established reputations for high-quality cards. Some of the other lesser-known brands might work perfectly well, but they also might not be all they claim to be.

What do all those codes on SD memory cards mean?

Memory cards have a bunch of codes and acronyms that are used to describe their capabilities. Here are the main ones relevant to memory cards for the Canon Rebel T3i. (I have more details on these ratings and codes on my Fastest SD Cards page.)

SD, SDHC, SDXC. While these technically distinguish, at least in part, the filesystem type that they’re formatted in, in practice, it’s useful for determining what size card you need. SD refers to cards 2GB and smaller. SDHC refers to cards over 2GB up to 32GB. And SDXC refers to cards over 32GB up to 2TB. In short, you can use any of them in this camera, so you can safely ignore this rating and choose based on the size of the card you want. If you want to put in a 32GB, go ahead. If you want to put in a 256GB card, knock yourself out.

Recommendation: The T3i is compatible with SDHC and SDXC cards. There’s no functional difference in speed — just storage space.

Tip: Don’t buy an SD Express or SDUC card. Both might look just like regular SD cards, but they’re emerging standards, and this camera isn’t compatible with those types of cards.

As a technical matter, SD Express cards are designed to be backward compatible and will function in this camera, but the camera won’t be able to use any extra speed benefit, and it may, in fact, perform slower than a non-SD Express card. SDUC cards require a different interface and will not function in this camera.

UHS-I. This refers to something known as Ultra High-Speed Bus, which is the technology behind how the camera interfaces with the card. So far there’s UHS-I (sometimes written, incorrectly, as UHS-1), UHS-II, and UHS-III, although UHS-III cards never really caught on and you’re very unlikely to run into one.

Recommendation: As the T3i’s instruction manual says, there’s no harm in using a card that’s rated with UHS-I (or even UHS-II), but it won’t give you any extra benefit in this camera.

There is one place a faster card still pays off, though: the card itself reads at full speed in a modern card reader, so a quicker card can cut the time it takes to copy a shoot onto your computer. It just won’t make the T3i write any faster.

U3. This is the speed class rating. U3 is designed to support 4K video recording at a sustained video capture rate of 30MB/s. The other video ratings you’ll see on cards are C10 (Class 10) and U1.

Recommendation: Cards with a U3 rating are the safest bet, especially if you plan to record video footage, because they’re designed to handle a constant stream of data being written to the card. If you’re solely doing still photos, U1 will work fine too.