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.

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.

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.

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.

Not to mention the product performs at the top of it’s class….a win-win.

Can’t wait to get it!

RIDE

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.

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

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.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9406