I want to buy a Sandisk 4GB Extreme III Compactflash Card. On ebay and a few places on google they are around 100 pounds, but jessops are selling for twice that. I have read that there are many places selling fake CF cards, taking slow, budget 4GB cards and putting these expensive Scandisk lables on them. How do i tell if i have a fake card, and hence tell my credit card or paypall to give me my money back? Is there some software that interrogates the chip in the card and tells you exactly what it is, and hence a genuine card? Thanks for any helpful advice...
2006-12-30 07:19:50 · 4 answers · asked by EvilSpike 2 in Arts & Humanities ➔ Visual Arts ➔ Photography
Hmm... thats kind of a tough one. If you already have the card and have not done anything with it yet, check what kind of software it may or may not have already installed on it. Some of these cards come with software on them. If not put it in your camera. If you have a digital SLR, set it on continuous shooting mode, and set the image quality to raw or raw plus jpg if you have that option and snap off as many shots as you can repetitively until it stops taking pictures. This means that the buffer is full. This should also be a times operation. When the camera stops taking pictures stop the time.
Later you will be able to load all the pictured on to your computer and see how much memory was taken up by the files.
Then a little simple math and you can figure how many megabytes were taken per second.
That card should be able to write at 20 mb/ps.
See if what it is capable of matches the amount of pictures it can take before the buffer is over run.
Cheaper cards will generally have a slower write speed and you will overrun the buffer much sooner than if it was a genuine card. It will help if you have some cheaper cards to test this against.
Thats one thought however you may also want to check with a local camera store such as (Rits, Kits, Wolf camera), B&H if there is one near by.
2006-12-30 08:12:24 · answer #1 · answered by elapse 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I'm not sure about your question but am posting to offer an opinion counter to one of the responses. You can get great deals on CF and SD cards from reputable internet businesses such as Newegg.com. The cheaper cards at the big box stores are usually slower cards. From what I have seen you can definitely get more bang for your buck by shopping around. I would agree with staying away from eBay if the deal looks too good to be true.
2006-12-31 00:56:38 · answer #2 · answered by k3s793 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I wouldn't buy a CF card for ebay or off the internet. You can get it much cheaper at a local store like Circuit City or something...I just got a sandisk 2GB a couple weeks ago for 20 bucks.
2006-12-30 18:33:58 · answer #3 · answered by breakdown107 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
As you mention Jessops, I assume you are in the UK. You can therefore buy from www.7dayshop.com which is a very reputable company trading from Guernsey. They are quoting the card you require at £88.99 inc. VAT. This will be genuine and you could buy with confidence. Direct link to specific page below
2006-12-31 06:23:38 · answer #4 · answered by rdenig_male 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋