Kingston CF Cards panned by B&H ??

My wife & I journeyed in to B&H yesterday to pick up a few (read: $$) goodies yesterday and when I was buying a 4G 133x Kingston CF card, the counter guy tried steering me to a SanDisk card instead. He was very nice and I don't think he was trying to feed me some bum dope, but he referred to Kingston cards as third party, made by several different outfits, and prone to failure. I have had a Kingston 2G 133x card for nearly a year without one glitch at all.

Anybody else heard the same?

i've had two or three Kingston 2GB CF cards for the last 2-3 years and they are working fine for me.

I would take any recommendation...

I would take any recommendation made by an employee of any camera store with the utmost grain of salt!

Often, the salesperson is just plain mistaken in the recommendation. A Calumet salesman swore to me that there was no problem with the early 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS lenses at 300mm in the vertical position. Canon soon recalled these lenses for a fix.

However, more often they have some ulterior motive in desiring to sell one item over another. When, in my early twenties, I worked part-time selling cameras, the store owner would offer his sales-persons a bonus to sell items that he wanted to get rid of. Naturally, being greedy, we would push the items that included a bonus for us. I never considered myself dishonest in doing so. Stores often push items which will provide the highest profit margin.

I have had no problems in years of shooting with Kingston cards. I have recently purchased two 4 GIG Kingston cards from Adorama at about $40 each. They included a $20 per card rebate. Twenty bucks for a 4 GIG card is pretty good!

narlus wrote in post #5782211
i've had two or three Kingston 2GB CF cards for the last 2-3 years and they are working fine for me.

Same experience.....

I've never had a problem with Kingston either, for flash cards or computer RAM. I don't hesitate to use them or buy them if I see a good deal and I need one.

Of course there is always the possibility that he knew exactly what he was talking about. One can only imagine the number of cards that are sold or returned to B&H in any given month.

This is one of those things where whatever price is right for me, Kingston, Sandisk or Lexar will be my choice. As long as they are the same speed and or the right size i'm looking to purchase.

I did or was geared to Sandisk because of an article or experience I read/heard where someone forgot to take out the CF card out of their pants before laundry and when the laundry cycle was done, the CF card worked flawlessly. From there the rumors flew around stating that it has weathersealing and what not blah blah blah.

how truthful it is, well, I never had any issues with any of the brand cards. Although I only will stick with LExar, Sandisk and Kingston, nothing else. I think much of it is what makes you feel comfortable.

not to go to a tangent but I will never touch a western digital external drive. Why? Because it has failed on me twice, almost losing all my data (thanks to a recovery software I used). The bottom line is, there will be people out there that swear by Western Digital.

Of course all hard disks will fail eventually. But in my personal opinion, Western Digital was the top drive some years ago but has fallen quite a way in rank. My current first choice in Seagate with Maxtore, which in now owned by Seagate, second.

Had trouble with a couple of 1GB Kingston CF cards. Intermittent trouble where some picture files couldn't be read from the cards.

I had a Sandisk fail...

Cards from any brand will occasionally fail. It is the general record of failure that you should look at.

If ANY card had the failure rate of Canon DSLR cameras right off the assembly line, they would be called trash and no one would buy them.

nutsnbolts wrote in post #5783707
I did or was geared to Sandisk because of an article or experience I read/heard where someone forgot to take out the CF card out of their pants before laundry and when the laundry cycle was done, the CF card worked flawlessly. From there the rumors flew around stating that it has weathersealing and what not blah blah blah.

I think that has more to do with the inherit toughness of flash media in general than any particular brand. I've got a 1gb Kingston flash drive that I carry on my key chain and it's been through the wash several times now with no problems.

That said, I've got all Sandisk in my camera bag. However that is mostly due to the fact that we use Sandisk at work as well and I've come to trust them.

Lexar has never let me down.

Kingston has some of the best memory made

I've washed their USB sticks multiple times and they are still rocking.. I haven't had the opportunity to wash my flash drives yet

NeutronBoy wrote in post #5782153
My wife & I journeyed in to B&H yesterday to pick up a few (read: $$) goodies yesterday and when I was buying a 4G 133x Kingston CF card, the counter guy tried steering me to a SanDisk card instead. He was very nice and I don't think he was trying to feed me some bum dope, but he referred to Kingston cards as third party, made by several different outfits, and prone to failure. I have had a Kingston 2G 133x card for nearly a year without one glitch at all.

Anybody else heard the same?

no .... but sandisk is all that i use and they are cheap enough now and have perpetual rebates so i would encourage you to do the same .

ed rader

thanks all ... Sandisk 4G was being sold at $57 - $20 rebate or the kingston at $28. Easy choice seeing as how my 2G Kingston has perfromed well enough.