Review Update: The Hoodman RAW Memory Cards; Hoodman Responds
Last week I posted a field report review of Hoodman’s RAW UDMA high-speed memory cards, and in my report I mentioned that while the cards performed flawlessly for me, and were fast as blazes, I couldn’t find a reason to justify their higher cost vs. similar size and speed Lexar and SanDisk cards (the Hoodman RAW cards run $70 to $80 more per card).
Yesterday, I heard from Lou Schmidt, VP of Marketing over at Hoodman Corporation, who sent this response to my review. I’m publishing his comments in their entirety below, but to cut to the chase, I called out in red why they’re more expensive, which told me exactly why they’re worth every extra penny. Here’s what Lou had to say:
“Thanks for the fine review of our Hoodman RAW CF cards… Thanks too for giving us the opportunity to explain why our customers are willing to pay more for Hoodman RAW memory cards. The RAW line has been in the marketplace for 18 months world wide and we have had ZERO in-field failures. Hoodman RAW is manufactured in Silicon Valley and is the only CF card built in the USA.
Both Sandisk and Lexar memory cards are built in ASIA in huge quantities to support the mass merchant market… Huge production will give you economies of scale which will allow you to lower your price, but there is a significant draw back to huge production runs… FAILURE RATES …which are tracking between 3 to 5% for mass merchant card makers. .
Professional photographers will not see mass merchant card makers supporting educational functions like Photoshop World or regional or national PPA shows because they are mass merchant card makers who can live with a 3 to 5 % failure rate. Which Pro will want to be the 3 -5% failure guy??? Hoodman has just completed exhibiting at 10 shows since January. Hoodman is pleased to give back by supporting educational programs in photography at the national, regional and dealer levels.
… Mass merchant card makers have always played the price game and continue to dump their cards in the marketplace because they are no longer selling well in the Photo Dealer Channel.
Hoodman customer service is manned from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday with live, helpful people… our competitors service systems will send you into endless voicemail loupes and make you wait 2 to 5 days for an offshore call center to get back to you; which is not much help when a customer needs answers now.
Yes, Hoodman RAW does cost more… Pros who can afford US built reliability and do not see memory as a commodity will continue to buy Hoodman RAW because they know us and see us doing our best to make the products that make their jobs easier.
Thanks for your time and efforts to understand the value a RAW memory card offers to the purchaser” –Lou Schmidt, Hoodman Corporation
I find the argument that the cards are made in US pretty old. Reminds me what the US car industry allways told us.
And why should the final customer support educational functions? And if their cards are flawless, why do they need customer support?
I may make some people angry by saying that much high-tech is produced in asia, not the us.
I could understand this as a statement like “support your own country, buy local” but not as the “it’s made in the us, so it’s better” argument. A little like buying food in the local groceries-store instead of some super-mall.
Still: The 0% failure-rate is pretty impressive, though i can’t believe the 3-5% failure rates of other brands.
The arguments are a little bit defensive in my taste, as a business owner I know that marketing activities can cost a lot of money and that the end customer usually is the one who have to carry the costs in the long run. So far all “mass produced” memory cards that I own have never let me down.The companies who produce them have always been very good at marketing their products in all kind of ways, obviously they do it more cost effective.
I’ve been using a Sandisk and a no-name card, and the no-name card has, maybe 3 times, had an issue with my D70 - the display would show “CHA” where the number of remaining exposures was. I would have to turn the camera off and back on, and that picture would (obviously) be lost. However, all the other images on the card would be fine. I reformatted the card in both my Mac and in my camera and haven’t had the problem since. I haven’t had a problem with the Sandisk card, and I’ve used it a lot more (I’ve had it since mid-2005, the no-name since early 2007).
For me, I’m not going to buy another no-name card, but since I’m not a professional photographer, I’m likely not going to be buying any Hoodman cards, either. When you aren’t making any money doing it, it is hard to justify any expense. However, if I was a pro, I would seriously consider the Hoodman cards.
I’ve have ZERO in-field failures using Sandisk and Lexar. And my Lexar cards have had an occaisional trip through the laundry, and they come out sparkling clean and work great!
Lou is doing his job… defending his companies product.
Ron
As somebody who works in the US and is watching friends work in the US, and has CLIENTS who work in the US, It definately tips the hand in Hoodmans favor for me, and when it comes time to expand to 8gb and larger cards (which will probably be soon) I will probably go their route. I can’t expect my clients to have the money to afford my services if I am not willing to support the US made industry options **that meet or excede in performance** any other product out there. Its rather simple for me. If I can find a american made prodcut that does the job - and well - in this case, I’m willing to pay a bit extra to support.
Then again I’m an artist and in my artist world support is everything,
I don’t quite agree with him & his Pro Photographers statement. I shoot Lexar 300X UDMA cards & ATP Promax 2 UDMA cards & i use the Hoodman Firewire 800 card reader & they have never failed me. & in the past i have also used Sandisk . No problems… & you can’t tell me that Lexar & Sandisk aren’t all about the Top quality. So many Amateurs put their gear through alot of the same torture test as the Pro’s they just don’t have a client to report back to with their results. Now I’m all about Made in the USA but I also want a good deal & the performance is so close to the other guys that they will loss every time. Their card reader is Awsome But the cards are just too much.
PS . Now if there cards were 350 or 400 speed then i don’t think we would be talking about this & i would own 4 of them myself.
Jared
No matter which way you spin it, at the end of the day $250 is a lot of “quan” to spend on a memory card.
I will pay double for anything, if I can buy it MADE IN USA!. Nothing more kills me when I have to call somewhere to get service and it is some one speaking some other language or trying to speak English.
When I am going to buy a laptop, printer, camera, CF Cards, etc… I find where it is made and where there support services are located first. I will always search the made in the USA first, then go to something else if not.
18 months means very little in terms of defects. I have had zero failures in the last 4yrs using SanDisk and Transcend CF cards.
CF cards are a commodity which are all produced in an automated process.
In a like-for-like comparison, especially a commodity, I cannot justify the extra price no matter where it is made.
There has to be a greater differentiation to support the extra price and I do not see it. The value propostion is not there for me.
I use Lexar cards and have had one of their professional cards fail.
It was a 2gig card I was using a couple of years ago.
I tried to recover the images myself and couldn’t.
I sent the card to Lexar who recovered the images and sent a new 2 gig card back.
That was the only time I have ever had a problem with a Lexar card.
But it did fail.
I think any card will fail after a time.
Nothing is made to last forever.
The cards are made in the US so they have a smaller carbon footprint
Well that’s the new “made in the USA is better” slogan right?
I know it’s not always possible, and it is unfortunate that producing things in the US is so costly, but I am always willing to pay the extra money to buy products made in the US.
I have to admit. Sandisk and Lexar are the big 2. There are a lot more of them out there than the Hoodman. I really hate to say but, I think you will see one or two Hoodmans fail as time goes on.
I also think that these cards are getting disposable. I remember starting, and paying for a 256K card (100.00) and thinking I will never fill this thing up. Now I don’t even know what I have done with it. I then progressed to 512, thinking the same, then to 1 gb, then 2gb and now use 4gb. As memory becomes cheaper and smaller in six months, I see moving onto 8gb and 16. To me that makes the 1gb a thing of the past.
Recap: Daring thing to say zero failures because as more get out there there is bound to be one.
Just my two cents
Tq
OK, all valid comments but, I am a bit puzzled about the price. Hoodman’s own website list the price of the 8GB card as $249 - i zipped over to Best Buys site (usually lowest prices on commodity electronics) and found the Lexar UDMA 300X 9GB priced at $260. Huh?
Why wouldn’t you buy Hoodman for $10 less? Just my 2C.
When ever you buy something from another country and its less money you have to ask your self the question “Who’s getting paid less to make this?” And you know someone is.
I also like the above comment on the carbon footprint of imported items. There is a bigger picture and a greater good concept that has to be thought of and while this does detract a bit away from whether or not Hoodman is a better product, I think everyone should be taking this into consideration inorder to make the most responsible purchase you can make.
I will definitely be buying a Hoodman the next time I need a card!
I can believe the 3-5% failure rate in the general market, but you can bet that it’s not evenly distributed. The no-name cards are likely much higher, and the first-tier brands are likely much lower (maybe even under 1%)?
So what’s the failure rate of the top-of-the-line Lexar or Sandisk cards? Then compare that to the Hoodman, and you’ll get a more accurate cost/benefit picture. Comparing Hoodman card failure rates to no-name cards isn’t really a fair comparison.
I love my country just as much as the next person and am all for supporting American made. However, it is going to take more then that to account for that kind of price difference. They may not produce as much but they don’t have overseas shipping rates to deal with either. I would think as business they would have checked out all production cost and if they could keep their bottom line low enough to compete with what is already out there on the market since they are not marketing an unique product that no one else supplies and can set their own prices. After reading his response I feel like they are trying to take advantage of our patroness for our country because of the times we are in. Not to mention that $80 is a tank of gas. I hate to say it, but as long as American companies charge prices like this for their products all they are doing is forcing me to support overseas companies.
To Stefan,
I wish it was only 80 dollars to fill my tank.
To
I have used Lexar and have been happy with them. I accidentally erased a card, got it switched in the D3 slots. The fact that Lexar has daisy, stackable firewire 800 readers and that they come with recovery software that actually works (better in Vista than Leopard unfortunately) is a big deal to me. I would like to buy only US products, and I would like to be able to afford it. But, my D3 is not made in the US, nor my Nikkor lenses, nor my gas, nor the parts that make up my Diesel Ford Truck (for sale). It is a price game before failure rates, thats why the D3 has dual slots.
I would like to be able to afford and test Hoodman’s claims, but alas the money tree has yet to grow from my photoseeds.
Sorry Stefan, I meant to post To Mitzs.
I have a different few of these things in that I buy allot of them. I work for a group that purchases about 150-300 every other month (I told you it was allot). I will tell you the facts are they do fail, and fail regularly. Lexar has an average of 3-5 failures a month. Just to cause some more confusion, I switched to purchasing SanDisk and for 3 months Ive had zero failures.
I will be looking at hoodman in the future. In our business failure is an absolute no go.
After having lost a COMPLETE photoshoot on a Sandisk Extreme III 4GB (the card suddenly went electrically ‘dead’: recovering was impossible and after contacting the Sandisk helpdesk they concuded this was a lost case for me - they just could return me a new card…), I seriously will consider buying a card that can promise me more reliabilty!
Just one lost shoot CAN sometimes mean loosing an important client (or worse: your credibility).
Believe me: it happened to me…
I think this is a story worth note, one it shows most of us are willing to for go buying US made stuff for china made stuff….which means we probably won’t ever get manufacturing jobs back in the us….
I have had a lexar card crap out on me…its a crappy feeling….I think I would pay more for a 100% guarantee that being said is it possible to make a 100% Guarantee? Its all Zeros and Ones, and you only need to loose one to loose them all…
I hate it when a lose a bit because it’s on the loose.
100% guarantee is one thing but there is nothing like 100% reliability. - When a shoot is lost it is lost. It doesn´t matter which card is failing - US made or not.
It may be useful to check out the updated information from Rob’s web site, he includes the Hoodman card.
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9406
I’d like to see the data backing up the claim of 3-5% failure rates for other cards. That is extremely high! Furthermore, you’ve got to compare apples-to-apples: what are the failure rates of SanDisk and Lexar “professional” UDMA cards? (For that matter, what is a “mass merchant” card?) Finally, how many cards does Hoodman have in the field? Zero failures is not very impressive, or statistically significant, if they’ve only sold a few hundred cars…
Do they stand behind that failure rate? If it fails will they reimburse you for the card and lost pictures? Probably not.
I have had a Sandisk CF card fail, but only after 5 years of regular use. I would like to see what their failure rates are like when they have been in the market for at least 5 years… a year and a half of 0 REPORTED failures doesn’t convince me.
I’m not sure what “3-5% failure rate” means. Does that mean that for every 100 pictures you put on your card, you can expect to retrieve 95-97% of them? Or does it mean that for every 100 times you load the card into your camera, you can read the images from the card 95-97% of those times?
Or does it mean at the end of the assembly line, they take 3-5% of the the manufactured cards — the ones that don’t pass the quality tests — and they throw them away?
In any case, as I said above, I’ve never ever had a lost image that I can blame on the card — I use both lexar and sandisk.
Hoodman is not a memory company anyway… they are selling something they have contracted to be manufactured. Perhaps their manufacturer is only sending 95% of the production run to them — and they can them claim that 100% of the cards actually work before they send them to the distribution channels.
Bottom Line: If there is a good argument for buying Hoodman cards, their VP did not put it forth. In my experience, Sandisk and Lexar have been 100% reliable, 100% of the time, by any measure.
Ron
1) He have zero in field failures, doesn’t mean that will be forever. As lexar and Sandisk ship a few tens of thousands of times more CF than hoodman, there’re bound to be more failures than hoodman, don’t be hoodwinked.
2) The large failure rates quoted, he must know more than anybody else, as Lexar may not itself have such figures due to the complex nature of failures. Failures due to user using the flash memory with near zero batteries are not to be counted as card failures, and that in itself is a common cause of failure. In addition, these high failure rates quoted take consumer cards into consideration, and these consumer cards use MLC flash.
3) All SLC memories have very low failure rates, and that’s what is used in Sandisk and lexar’s professional flash memory. MLC have higher rates of failure. Even so, if pictures mean anything, my practice is to retire flash cards once every 12 months, the cost of replacement is infinitesmal compared to the cost of losing data.
4) Replacement of far cheaper Lexar and Sandisk cards is far cheaper than paying Hoodman pricing.
I use Hoodman because these cards are VERY fast and failsafe. Just returned from a 6-month sojourn in Europe, Russia, the Balkans. Not one problem and not one shot missed. Made in the USA or not, the quality control this company employs is amazing. Worth the price - and more.
Well…in the market for a new SD card and decided to support the local U.S. company. I went with the 8GB version for $109….and could have bought a Extreme III version for $75 (from Costco). So for the extra cash…I feel good about buying direct from Hoodman and supporting the local guy.
Not to mention the product performs at the top of it’s class….a win-win.
Can’t wait to get it!
RIDE
For my camcorder, the Hoodman version of the capacity same card costs 6x to 10x more than what I’m using. I would love to buy domestic, but there’s a point where I can’t justify it, and sadly, they’ve exceeded it.
Assuming their failure claims is correct, there may be a justification for high end users. If the data on the card is worth many times the cost of the card where a random card failure after the shoot means reshooting or that several hundred dollars of expenses creating the shots on the card are just for naught, then maybe, but that’s not me right now.
I am not going to pay more than $100 for a card I’m just going to throw away in two years when higher capacities come along. I don’t care who you are.
As for those failure stats, I think they’re inflated. I don’t think you’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison of the top product lines from top brands.
I’ve had 100% of Lexar professional cards fail on me. 3 out of 3.
I’ve had 30% of Sandisk cards fail on me, the last being an Extreme III 8G card full of images. 2 out of 6.
This were not cheap CF cards and not a huge sample, but not impressive results.
What the people above who haven’t had a failure don’t realise is just because they got a good one doesn’t mean the product is all good.
A 3-5% failure rate means, for those who don’t understand this concept, that 3-5 photographers out of every hundred [assuming they own/use same no. of cards] will have failures. So 95-97% will have no problem.
The other 3-5% will however, be very peed off.
I think the point has been missed that these cards are made for professional photographers.
I’ve had Lexar Professional cards flake out on me. I’ve had Sandisk cards do the same. I’ve Never had my Hoodman cards do anything but deliver RAW information (pardon the pun).
For average Joe Consumer, purchase a no name/Sandisk/Lexar card. You don’t need to “get it”, and if your X-mas shots are replaced by a “format error”, well, there’s always next year Grandma, what?
In the professional world where some equipment is mission critical; there is NO substitute for quality and reliability! Full stop. Try explaining to a client that half his wedding/child/headshot photos are gone (we do shoot 50/50 at least on different systems, yes?) because you choose to slap a no name/substandard CF card into a $5k body. NOW get your assistant & camera ready for some spectacular action shots! LOL.
Seriously, you do pay extra for quality and being made in the USA is just an added bonus for you Americans, no? It does help your economy and right now it needs all the help it can get.