Buying SD card off Amazon - real or fake?

martyp

Hi all,
After recently buying a 32GB memory card from ebay which I think seems a bit dubious I'm wondering about the ones on Amazon now...
I noticed Transcend cards seem really good value, Class 10 speed, 8GB for as little as just under £10 with lifetime warranty...
Thing is, can I trust these or do I need to pay much more to get a Sandisk or Panasonic card which may be of a lower class of speed (e.g. 2 or 4)
I'm going to be using the card in a Panasonic Lumix TZ7 digital camera so would really like something reliable...

Many thanks

googler

I'm not getting the 'real or fake' - are you querying whether or not Amazon is selling genuine Transcend cards....?

System

I can't find a 32GB SD Card for under £30 on Amazon.

martyp

googler wrote: »

I'm not getting the 'real or fake' - are you querying whether or not Amazon is selling genuine Transcend cards....?

I know ebay has lots of fakes for sale but also read that there are fakes on Amazon too. I'm much more familiar with ebay but don't really understand who I'm buying from on Amazon or if I'm buying from Amazon directly so unsure how genuine the sellers are apart from their feedback...
I assume the sellers on Amazon.co.uk are in the UK?

martyp

!!!!!! wrote: »

I can't find a 32GB SD Card for under £30 on Amazon.

I bought a 32GB from a seller in China on ebay for only £10.88 thinking it would be a generic unbranded one equivalent to a genuine branded one but just left generic to enable them to sell them direct from the factory without legal action etc.
A colleague at work said he bought a generic SD card from China and it works well but I used h2testw on my 32GB card and it showed errors reading/writing data. Even though it's a class 6 my camera brings up errors with the writing speed when taking HD video after only 9 seconds...

aerostar

I would say ALL low price high capacity cards from the far east are fakes. Wherever you buy , local or otherwise, download h2testw program and run the test on your card. I got bitten 2 years ago, but with the evidence from the program and other peoples comments, I got refunded by Paypal.

Here is a link for you and anyone else.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/H2testw.shtml

Also do a search on google for fake sd cards etc, there is a LOT of info around.

JasX

well I got my £18 16GB transcend card on order from mymemory.co.uk, a fairly legit retailer..... any issues its going straight back but not had problems with em before.

aerostar

JasX wrote: »

well I got my £18 16GB transcend card on order from mymemory.co.uk, a fairly legit retailer..... any issues its going straight back but not had problems with em before.

Regret to say that even legit retailers have been caught out by their suppliers.

highbrock

Unfortunately many of the sellers are unaware what they are doing, buying cheap Chinese wholesale in good faith.
I was duped like this and my response was to start the site memoracle dot com which has links to free software to download which will check any type of flash memory card and if it is fake give you the proof to confront your vendor with, you will find they act very quickly in your favour with proof in front of their nose!!
There is plenty of information on there too and though it is aimed at SD cards, the software can be used with any type of card.
Good luck and I hope that helps!

wr1ght

if it seems to good to be true it usually is

sevlow

Most manufacturers including Transcend offer lifetime warranty on their products. If you go onto their site/s you can register your card and they will verify that the seriel number is legitimate. If the serial isn't recognised and the card turns out to be fake at least you can contact the suppler quickly