Kingston 4 GB CompactFlash Memory Card CF/4GB

Oh my freaking Bagel-making Goddess, I would not recommend this product to my worst enemy! If you are reading this, I was just like you at one time: Hoping to save a couple bucks and get a nice sized flash card for cheap. I ordered two of these craps; one for me and one for my girlfriend to use in our photography class. After I excitedly tore open the package and thrusted it into our Canon Rebel, I painfully found out that you really do get what you paid for.

We had just taken about 20 photos of us messing around outside, when I received the fateful error message notifying me of a "CF Error". At first I thought it was just because I forgot to format it correctly or something. I then formatted it through the camera and proceeded cautiously. Everything was working fine, so I started taking more photos of us. It wasn't long before I got the error message again. I was getting really worried and a little pissed. Our class project shoot was coming up and so was our anniversary. I wanted to be able to depend on this card to at least get us through that before returning it. I thought to myself, maybe I was doing something wrong. I was previewing pretty quickly after each shot. Maybe that was the cause of the problem . Oh how wrong I was.

I went home and tried to figure out what the problem was. I mean, there were some good reviews of this card. Some people got it to work. Why can't I? I tried everything. Shooting in bursts then previewing it, turning it off while it was transferring to the card, etc. The only time it got the error was when I previewed it too early. So I thought that was the problem. We went out for our anniversary and since the card hadn't given us any problems since I stopped previewing each shot, I thought it would be ok. I was still paranoid though and backed it up at home right after our date. It made it through the whole day without an error. And so we felt a little easier about our shoot the next day. I just about finished shooting 80 pics and was right about to back it up, when I got the soul-crushing, baby-punch-rage-filling message "CF ERROR".

It was a good thing my girlfriend took it away from me before I physically broke and destroyed it. And so here I am, a mere 6 hours from the incident writing this lengthy review. I have never written a review for anything before this, but I wanted to make sure that whosoever decides to read this be educated on the terrors of this product. If I had read a detailed sob-story such as this, I would have never ordered this danged wicked shedevil. So please, if you're smart you would either buy a high-quality card from Amazon.com or go to wal-mart (I hate walmart too..) and buy a 4gb Sandisk (30mb/sec!!!) for only a few bucks more.

I own 4 of these 4 GB memory cards for 2 of my trail cams. I swap the ones I've taken home and saved the wanted images on my computer for the ones that have new data in the cameras. They all have performed well to store images and/or video. My oldest set is about a year old and I've recently purchased a newer set.

So against my better judgement, I purchased this cheaper CF card for a professional gig for my assistant's camera (a.k.a. my wife). Half way through the wedding, my wife's camera started behaving weirdly - the RAW cache wouldn't empty onto the card so it was always about 20 pictures behind. I transferred it to my camera, giving me the same strange behavior.

At the end of the day, while backing up all the files, it turned out that over 300 images had not been saved at ALL. Running diagnostics on the card showed that one of its storage areas had failed.

I wrote an email to Kingston Customer Service, nicely voicing my concerns and asking for them to replace the card. I have not even received an acknowledgment from their part, after sending the email multiple times.

Kingston are normally great with this stuff, so I don't know what's wrong.

That said, this may have been a dud from the start so I am not saying the entire line is terrible, as I am sure some people on here have used this card for months on end with no problems...I am just disappointed and from now on will pay the extra fifty bucks for a more expensive card to match my primary cards!