If you buy used digital photography gear or are dealing with certain eBay sellers, you should be on the lookout for fake merchandise. “Compact Flash Memory cards – is yours a fake?” by Camera Dojo goes into great detail as to how you can determine whether a card is genuine.
The first fake CF card I came across was pretty obvious, visually. I received it with a used camera I bought, so I really couldn’t complain. It was basically free and I was thrilled at the time (2006) to have a 2GB card thrown in with a camera. But it was the performance of the cart that tipped me off to the real problem. The card was significantly slower in the writes than my other SanDisk Ultra II cards; about half the write speed or worse.
Some of the things that give away the fake cards are:
- Poor labeling.
- Subtle differences in packaging.
- Poor read/write performance.
- Too-good-to-be-true prices.
- Manuals with poor printing and paper quality.
Be extra vigilant when hunting for bargains on camera gear, and remember that you get what you pay for. You should be extra wary of sellers located outside United States jurisdiction in places such as Hong Kong, where there is a huge market for counterfeit products.
The photo of a fake compact flash card shown above is by Rick the Photo Guy on Flickr. Take a look at the picture in Rick’s Flickr photostream, where he has added annotations highlighting the different clues that give away the fake card.
