Whilst moving house I seem to have lost one of my memory cards, a Sandisk 1GB Ultra II, so I've been looking to replace it. In the past I would normally have just gone to Ebay to pick up a bargin but these days the vast majority of all cards on Ebay are fakes which either don't offer the performance of the card they are meant to be, are not of the stated capacity, are not as reliable or all three! Sadly it is very hard to tell the fake cards from real ones as the differences between them are so small that in some cases even the manufacturer will find it difficult or impossible to spot the fake by visual inspection alone. The end result is that the only wake to tell if a card on Ebay is fake is to buy, by which time it's too late.

Having once bought a non branded memory card from Jessops that failed the very first time I used it I now only ever use either Sandisk, Lexar or Kingston memory cards but prefer Sandisk as often they are the cheapest and are readily available. As I almost always shoot in RAW I started searching for the best price on a Sandisk 2GB Extreme III Compact Flash Card as these cards can achieve 20MB per second write and read speeds and allows me to store over 300 photos before downloading them onto my X-Drive which is often enough for an entire day's photography.

Looking around revealed a wide range of prices, at the time of writing these are:

• Warehouse Express £82.99

• Pixmania £72.00

• Park Cameras £67.00

• Jessops £101.99

Then I went to MyMemory who are currently selling them for just £52.99 which is an absolute bargin and nearly half the ridiculous price that Jessops charge! I ordered one of these and it arrived 2 days later sent Registered Post and it performs superbly and, perhaps most importantly, is a genuine card. My Canon 10D, by today's standards, is a slow camera typically taking 57 seconds to empty a full buffer of RAW files using a Sandisk Ultra II. Using the Sandisk Extreme III card has brought this down to an average of 47 seconds. This is still slow but a 10 second saving is quite a difference! I'm so impressed by these cards and this price that I think I will replace all my old cards with these.

Sandisk recently released their fastest card, the Extreme IV which MyMemory are currently selling for £86.99 and offer read/write speeds of 40MB per second but my camera wouldn't really be able to use these cards to their full potential and I couldn't justify the price increase at this time.....maybe next month

If you want to find out more about fake memory cards you can read the following articles:
How To Identify Counterfeit SanDisk Ultra II Secure Digital Cards
How To Identify Counterfeit Sony Memory Stick Pro & Duo MagicGate Cards
How To Identify Counterfeit SanDisk Ultra II Compact Flash Cards
How To Identify Counterfeit Sandisk Extreme III Compact Flash Cards