A SanDisk Extreme III Compact Flash memory card

Just made an interesting discovery in a blog post expanding on a post on The Online Photographer: apparently, according to an engineer from SanDisk, at any one time around 30% of SanDisk cards ‘in the wild’ are counterfeit.

That’s an incredible number!  The articles suggest that many of these counterfeit cards originate from eBay.

I personally use SanDisk Extreme IIIs as my card of choice – I have a couple of 4GB ones that I use in rotation for my 5DMkII.  They’re all a couple of years old now… they’re back from my 40D days, when 4GB was a decent size for 10MP RAW files.  But they’re all still in perfect working order after having a lot of use made out of them, and I don’t have any real need to upgrade.

The cards I use are currently about £30 on Amazon, but occasionally they go on sale for about £18.  I use them because they’re fast enough to keep up with the 5DMkII for video and are generally considered a fairly reliable card.