Fake Sandisk Ultra II CF cards
It seems that there are a number of fake CF cards floating around, purporting to be expensive models but actually cheap, slower, non-warrantied counterfeit cards.
Muggins here got caught out by this, buying what purported to be a Sandisk Ultra II 2GB Compact Flash card from a seller on eBay with a very good feedback score: nearly 2000, with 99.9% positives and no negatives in the last 6 months. The card arrived promptly, and looked legitimate, in professional-looking packaging with one of those little clear plastic CF cases.
However, when fitted into my Minolta Dimage A1, the write speed was abysmal, although the capacity claimed to be correct (but I did not test this). I had read that with the latest camera firmware, this should be a fair improvement over my older-generation Viking 512MB card, but it ended up being significantly slower. I'd estimate it was running at about 500KB/s write speed, a long way short of the speed of which the camera is capable, never mind the claimed 10MB/s. Also, the manual mentioned a 5-year warranty instead of the lifetime warranty expected.
A bit of searching showed up other cases, and gave the UK number for Sandisk (0207 365 4193), who I rang to check the serial number. They confirmed this was a fake — the serial number should be longer than 0602 and should start with an A or a B. The edge of the card reading 2GH 0602 is shown below, with the number enhanced to make it easier to read:
Additionally, the label on the back of the card was way off straight. I'd expect Sandisk’s production line to do better than this:
The seller tells me he didn’t know they were fake; and that his Hong Kong supplier has now admitted the problem. To his credit, the seller has given me a full refund including postage without any questions, and contacted everyone else who bought the hookey cards from him to offer the same deal. In the meantime, a Kingston card from MyMemory is on its way to me…
Further update: apparently my choice of Kingston for the Minolta was poor. It works far better than the fake card, but not up to the potential of either card or camera. Allegedly, there’s some sort of performance-hurting incompatibility between the two. It works fast enough for me, though, so I can’t be bothered to do anything about it.