Kingston CF Cards

CWSkopec

Anyone have any experience (good or bad) with Kingston brand CF cards? I see an 8gb 133x Kingston on Amazon for $19.95 and that's right about a price that my budget will allow for photography add-ons.

I'm not so concerned about the write speed, I'm not often in a situation where I need to shoot bursts. Price and size are what's attracting me, but I also don't want to risk losing 8gb worth of photos due to an unreliable card.

ziggy53

I have exactly one Kingston card, an older 2Gig "Elite Pro", 50x, that I bought a long time ago (probably 2006) just because I got it cheap. It is so much slower in use compared to the Sandisk Ultra II that I was also using that I now only use it as a last resort backup card.

It also was the only card I ever bought to get noticeably warm during transfer into the computer.

That experience has turned me off to Kingston cards.

I have standardized on Sandisk for my Canon cameras and Lexar for my Minolta A2 and for my father's Nikon stuff. Those (Sandisk and Lexar) seem to be working very well indeed.

Art Scott

CWSkopec wrote:

Anyone have any experience (good or bad) with Kingston brand CF cards? I see an 8gb 133x Kingston on Amazon for $19.95 and that's right about a price that my budget will allow for photography add-ons.

I'm not so concerned about the write speed, I'm not often in a situation where I need to shoot bursts. Price and size are what's attracting me, but I also don't want to risk losing 8gb worth of photos due to an unreliable card.

NewEgg has 8gb Transcend cards for as low as 23.99....a tad higher but I have never had a problem with them at all....I also own 2- 80x Lexars for my Konica Minolta A2.....the transcends are for my dslrs and have worked like a dream from day one.....................cards I have had overheating probs with are: KINGSTON, PDQ, & PNY.....Also have had Kingston refuse to be recognized in my KM 7D's and a couple of MP3 players.............

New Egg's shipping is pretty decent, price wise.

leahe

I have an older Kingston 2gb card that I probably purchased back in 2006. I have never had a problem with it. I still use it as a backup if needed.

CWSkopec

Ziggy, Art & Leah,
Thanks for the advice! Sounds like I'll shy away from the Kingstons... I've got a SanDisk Extreme III 4gb and I see the 8gb down to about what I paid for it a year ago, maybe I should splurge a little and go for that...

mrcoons

I do not use anything but Kingston CF cards anymore. I have never had one fail on me yet (I'm sure it may happen someday but other brands have done so a lot quicker) but I retire most cards after about 2 years service. Currently I am using the Ultimate version.

Mike J

I recently purchased 4 Kingston CF cards for my new D300. Have not used them that much but no problems yet. Best price I found was at Frys:
http://shop3.frys.com/search?search_type=regular&sqxts=1&query_string=kingston+ultimate&cat=0

Much less expensive than a SanDisk. Hopefully I won't end up regretting going this route.

Tee Why

I've used several of them and never had any problems. They are slower (at least with Canon's) than their stated speed would suggest.

I'd also recommend Ridata from neweggs.com as they are cheap, reliable, and very fast.

Good luck.

Phyxius

I have two 4 gb Kingston cards and have not had a problem. Speed and performance are comparable to the sandisk extreme cards I use as well. Shooting in continuous high speed bursts with a d300 still gets great performance.

In fact, thanks to your post I just bought 2 new 8gb cards, a 500gb external HD and a hard case for it. You're evil.

CWSkopec

Thanks for the responses everyone!
I've ultimately decided to make this month's car payment my last (horray! ) so the photography budget got reduced to 0 for the month, but hopefully that'll leave me with plenty of "fun" money next month.

Tee Why, it's good to hear you haven't had any problems with Ridata's but I had a bad experience with them about a year ago (on the order of 500-600 images lost in 1 day!) and even though it might have been a bad batch, I've sworn them off all together!

Phyxius... I'm sorry... :lol4

MT Stringer

Good choice on making the car payment!

I have a 16GB, 1 8gb and 2 4gb's and none of them have given me any trouble.

Mike

CWSkopec wrote:

Thanks for the responses everyone!
I've ultimately decided to make this month's car payment my last (horray! ) so the photography budget got reduced to 0 for the month, but hopefully that'll leave me with plenty of "fun" money next month.

Tee Why, it's good to hear you haven't had any problems with Ridata's but I had a bad experience with them about a year ago (on the order of 500-600 images lost in 1 day!) and even though it might have been a bad batch, I've sworn them off all together!

Phyxius... I'm sorry... :lol4

Nimai

Bad experiences...
I'm on my second 16GB 133x CF card from Kingston and it's misbehaving too. The price was great, from J&R Music World. I had to return the first one because it crashed my Canon 1D MkIII during playback. (I had to pop the battery to get the camera to un-freeze!) When I got back to my Mac, I had lost 9 images out of about 100 taken. I just tried out the replacement card I received, and it too had trouble playing back. No lost images this time, but definitely lost confidence. I'm going to avoid them.

Photoskipper

I got the 2GB 133X some time ago for the 300D (XT). It worked ok for the old camera but yet slower than the Sandisk Extreme II.

When I put it in the 5D, it took a long time to save a 12.8 MB RAW and a day to transfer the image to PC. So I just put it at the bottom of my backpack as last resort back up. Haven't use it for more than a year, not sure whether it is working or not.

I like the Extreme III 4GB card but just got the Extreme IV 8GB which is much faster.

stevod

Check this out for performance of different cards with specific DSLR bodies:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

S