December 05, 2006

Beware Of Cheap Imitations.

I can be a bit of a sucker for things that 'appear' to be free but as a friend of mine said recently "If things appear to be too good to be true then they probably are. The worst example of this that I've come across recently was the purchase of a very cheap sandisk memory card from e-bay.

It appeared to be fine at first everything seemed to work and there was no reason to question whether it was genuine or not, that is until we put it into a different camera! the holes at the bottom of the card are slightly larger than the holes in a genuine card, and not as accurately positioned consequently when we swapped it from one Canon to the other it bent the pins in the card slot and broke the camera. It went from bad to worse when, oblivious to the reason the camera had stopped working, we put the memory card back into another Canon and it did the same thing to that as well! Fortunately Matt's 350D appears to be ok for the moment, despite losing a pin that fell out after using the fake card however my 300D didn't come out of it so well and is now in for repair with a bill of £140 to face - Happy Christmas!

There's a great article here all about the fake cards and how to spot them so if you use sandisk CF cards be very very careful where you buy them from, it may cost a little more but it's worth making sure you've got the genuine article.

Extra Information

Although the sandisk sale has now ended the person we bought the card from is a regular seller on ebay so think twice about buying from wand3r3r19