yesterday when i was at the mall to buy something to eat i took a walk around the exhibition fair which was quite happening at that time. i spent a little time to visit one of this booth where i saw a lot of storage media which was on display with bright & colourful price tag stating the original & discounted price for each item. I was very curious when i saw the 3 different size Sandisk 'ULTRA II' compact flash cards which was extremely low price and I really mean EXTREMELY LOW! its only $99 for 4GB!! i got mine for B$200 plus each. i asked the salesman if this was real sandisk cards and he seem like he didnt understand so i asked nicely again 'are this original'? he replied yes. r u sure? i ask again ...yeah this are from china...i said 'your price is VERY CHEAP...?' so i pull out my sandisk 4GB ultra II cards from my pocket (surprised him) and asked him if he could open one of his Sandisk 4GB ultra II from the box for me to compare mine and the one he was selling and so he did. i compared his and mine...i started looking at both closely. They are almost identical. There's no way you can tell if u didnt have another one in your hand. I noticed the first difference was in the weight of the card. The one i have weighs a tiny bit more heavier then the one he was selling. both cards was printed with serial number and 'made in china' but the one he has has a weird running number printed..again, if u didnt have one in your hand u wouldnt notice...
I told him his one was lighter then mine then he asked me where i got mine from. I replied back to him 's'pore' and he went 'ohhh....' i said 'ya...ohhhh?' 'yours must be better' he said and i just smiled back..i told him if he dont mine could i bring my camera to test on his card and if i think its okay then i will buy it from him he said sure. So i got my camera and burst fire - 15 frames with my card. took me about 20-30 seconds to get everything into the card from the buffer. i repeated another time on my card just to make sure again and again it took around 30 sec. Now i took his and loaded into my camera and fired 15 frame straight (no adjustment watsoever on camera) and took around 1 minute 30 sec to finish transfer from the buffer. I repeated again and it was the same then i told him its not okay...
If you were going to buy a sandisk ultra II card i suppose you buy it for the transfer speed of the card. if not, you might as well buy a cheap kingston or a normal sandisk card which has a speed of 20-40x which may cost you cheaper. the only thing i didnt test was that if it'll have corrupted images if you burst fire too much (heating up the chipset). I didnt have much time to test at that time so if you were going to buy it, make sure you know what you're buying.
