I used to own an Intuos but I had a bit of a hard time getting used to making accurate edits with my hand on the tablet and my eyes on my monitor. I later sold that and bought a Wacom Cintiq Tablet. I bought the 12" It is expensive but I absolutely love it. It is so easy to edit when you are drawing right on the image. My Cintiq is Monitor 2 and is only used for Photoshop. My 27" 4K monitor is used for everything else (lightroom etc).

As others have written, it makes no difference what file format is being stored on the card as long as it is your camera that is storing it, then it knows what format the card is in and how to write. Some people write RAW + JPG at the same time.
I do agree though that I hope you are not storing your photos on the card. Hopefully you are copying them to a computer and then making backups on to other media.
I copy my photos off my card to my desktop. Once there I right away make backups of those files on to 2 different external drives (I then have 3 copies of each file). I then remove them from the camera card.

45MB is the speed of the card. Check the specs. It might only be the read speed. Read is usually faster than write. Write is more important because your camera is writing to the card. Read is when you are looking at the photos you took in your camera or for transferring the photos to your computer.
45MB is not that fast anymore. In SD cards, you have 95MB+. Again be careful to look at both read and write speeds. It does also have to do with what the devices speeds are. An older camera may not write at the speed of the faster cards whereas a newer camera like the D500 can write to the fastest cards at full speed (currently XQD card read/write at 440MB/s.

I agree with everyone here.
I first put my card in a card reader and transfer everything (through Lightroom) to my HD. I then back it all up to 2 different external HD's/NAS's before I start to work on them and before I remove them from the card.
Backup is everything.

If you choose B&W in your camera settings, all it is, is that your camera takes the color picture, RAW from the CMOS sensor and removes the color information. Shoot RAW + JPG in B&W and you will see the B&W JPG and Color RAW. You do the same thing but you have many options for conversion as mentioned by adding filters etc.
I also agree that Silver Effects Pro works well but really, so does all the programs or you doing it yourself. It all depends on the look you are trying to achieve.

It is sometime difficult to understand the difference between DPI and resolution.
Your screen only displays 72DPI which is why adjusting the DPI higher makes no sense if only using it for display on a monitor.
What makes it fill the screen is having the correct resolution. As an example, for my Dell 4K monitor, I save the photo as 3840x2160 72dpi.
That is a full screen image and best quality that my monitor can display.

I had a similar experience recently with my D500 and Nikon CA (but in my case, CA is for Canada).
I was out with both my D500 and D810 taking photos waiting to take a cruise on a lake. Stopped for lunch. The D810 was in my bag and I put the D500 on the table. I saw something I wanted to shoot so I picked up my camera and none of the buttons on the back of the camera worked. I could not press in the AF On button, seemed to be stuck in. Top buttons worked and I could take a photo albeit out of focus. I checked on my D810 and if the AF On is pushed in then the back bosy buttons do not work.
So I sent it in to Nikon. They came back with impact damage which may make sense but I never dropped it not did the camera hit anything and is always carried in a nice protective bag. After talking with them, the customer service person called me back later in the afternoon and told me they didn't see any damage with the outside of the camera so they were going to pass it under warranty. Saved me $700. It came back working as new... and for me, the whole thing took 2 weeks. Thanks Nikon!

The proper size for best quality on your monitor is 3840 x 2160.
As was mentioned above, you can upload that to UHH and let them compress it.

I have been using FastStone for many years but only as a viewer. Any editing is done in Lightroom/Photoshop CC.
Excellent program.

You would know if your monitor is calibrated because you would have had to do it. It is not something that you buy predone although many talk about calibration but because it changes regularly, it takes you to have the tools and calibrate the monitor.

I do see the rhino as well btw.

That was in Sept. 2012

You can see some of my photos here.
http://www.pbase.com/mkaplan/niagara_falls
I was not there at the times you want to be so your photos should be even more spectacular. I started walking from the left side (near the U.S. falls away from the visitor centre) to the visitor centre and back. It might help give you an idea as to what view you get.
I loved shooting some wide panoramas to get in both falls.

(Download)

If you show us an example you can possibly get some more helpful answers.
Under ideal conditions, today's smartphones can give a picture as good as any camera. It is only once you start pushing then that the camera phones really start to fail.
As others have said, that are a lot of possible reasons for his looking sharper than yours. It could even be as simple as his phones internal sharpening is higher than yours. Also note that due to the tiny sensor size in the phone, it has a greater depth of field so it may look sharper just because more of the photo seems in focus.
Post a photo and we can probably be more sure about that the problem was.

Things like this did it for me.
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/54460499

I used to own an SX50 and when the SX60 came out I did some research to maybe upgrade.
It didn't pay. It seemed the SX50 photos were of better quality.