When I first started shooting digital cameras back in early 2003, I was introduced to the Lexar CF compact flash card line. They were very reliable and I was a loyal user for many years, but over time Lexar just seemed to fall off of the map. No advertising, no interest in staying connected to pros and Sandisk was out maneuvering them at every turn. I hear that they are still out there and even ready to launch a new card that will overtake the Sandisk cards retaking the crown of fastest write speeds of any card on the market. Good for them. Competition is always good.

Over the years we’ve seen a couple of other card makers come and go and some have stayed. One I decided to try in the last twelve months has been SD cards made by Delkin. At first I figured all cards were most likely pretty much the same. They sure look similar. Delkin was a little less expensive than my Sandisks but not by much. Anyway I bought two and the experience has been very disappointing. I won’t beat this over the head, suffice it to say I lived and learned. And I figured that learning experience may be beneficial to others.

Here’s what I found. Apparently Delkin uses lesser quality plastic that their cards are encased in. Both of my Delkin cards have begun to fray at the edges so to speak. What I mean by that is the plastic on the end of the cards with the electrical contacts is breaking away and splitting open. You can see for yourself on the images below.

Delkin card falling apart at the edges.

The edges have begun to chip away and expose the entire electronic as one big chunk of metal

A second card that is also falling apart compared to the better quality Sandisk.

I’ve spoken with my dealer that I bought these cards from and they have assured me that Delkin will stand behind these 100%. I’m confident that they will, but to see this kind of failure in quality does not instill confidence. Thankfully, though each card has given me an error message at least twice, and pulling it from the camera and reinserting it fixed the error message. But now that I’m home I’ll be getting them replaced.

For additional information on CF and SD card write speeds and other details about digital memory cards you might want to take a look at Rob Galbraith’s site. He does a great job tracking down all the technical issues and specs on both CF and SD cards. Click here to see his web page.

Anyone else out there having problems with Delkin or any other cards? Tell me about your experiences with any cards you may be using.

Tags: damaged SD card, Delkin, poor quality

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 at 5:00 am and is filed under Equipment Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.