Viking CF512M 512 MB CompactFlash Card

Rating:
Summary: Nothing better than a half-gig hard drive for your Pocket PC
Review: It's probably a little early in the CF card's lifespan to write this review, but I'll focus on potential uses rather than reliability.

I basically bought the card for my HP Jornada 567 Pocket PC 2002. It already had 64 megs of memory, but I wanted more. I also already had a 256 MB card for my Nikon Coolpix 775, so this one was more for the handheld than anything else.

My HP can playback MP3's directly off the CF card without modification, and with drag-and-drop functionality from my notebook's hard drive, which is nice. That way I can store around a hundred songs for music on the go, which I typically listen to in the car, using a cassette adapter through the HP's headphone jack.

I also enjoy watching movies on the go, and with the downloadable Windows Media Encoder, I can reformat almost any movie file into .WMA format, and bring it with me. The card could conceivably store three full-length feature films at 192 x 144 resolution without much problem.

It's also great for carrying large text documents with you wherever you go...like, say, your novel, technical manuals, the Bible, as well as a couple dozen songs, and still have room for a movie or two...amazing! I don't know how I got around without this baby.

Another plus is that you will *never* run out of space while taking photos on vacation with your digital camera, even at the highest settings, unless you do field work for National Geographic.

So far, this card has changed my definition for personal entertainment and functionality. Viking makes pretty good hardware, too. Just watch out for any rebates they offer (there was no offer on *this* card, but be careful).

Now I'm just waiting for the Gigabyte card...

Rating:
Summary: Problem with card or camera?
Review: After reading some of these reviews, I thought I would add my two cents. I had some of the same problems with error corruption. I lost a few pictures after several weeks of use. I thought that it was due to the CF card. I actually got a quick response from Viking and after trying what they suggested (and failing to resolve the problem), they issued an RMA number and I had a new card within the week. Today, while perusing through some reviews of my camera (Canon Powershot s400), I read a review that suggested that the camera corrupts images with CF cards above 256MB. I don't know if this is true, but I don't have any other CF device to test this theory. So far, I have started using my card again, but I haven't reached above 256MB (the problem apparently occurs above 256MB of storage).

I hope it was only the CF card that I had and that the problem will not be an issue for the camera. As for the customer service, it was great for me, but I can speak for the service for Canadian customers as with the previous post.

Rating:
Summary: Great tech support, partially defective product (s)
Review: Summary: I had a great deal of trouble with a Viking 512 MB compact flash card, Viking was very helpful in replacing it with two 256 MB cards, but now the only 256 MB card I've used thus far has corrupted data as well. I give Viking tech support manager Patrick Beard 5 stars, he was very professional. However, the product quality rates only1 star. Average 3 stars. I did get my money back after shipping back the cards.

Details: In early December, just before a big overseas family vacation, I purchased one Viking 512 MB card, and one SimpleTech 256 card. The Viking card was the first one I used, and there were no problems for one week. Then one photo I took showed as a very small image with the caption CF CARD ERROR. I had no idea what this meant at the time and in fact the camera/card seemed to repair that image one hour later. Several days later I noticed a couple of images that were previously fine and now show CF Card ERROR. I had already taken over 300 photos on this card at this point and was concerned enough to switch to the SimpleTech card and took 200 photos on that card for the rest of the trip.

After coming back into the US, the Viking card would not upload the images into the computer. By the way the camera is G3 and the computer is high end new Dell running XP. The only method I finally got the images into the computer was using Windows explorer. Then I realized 60 images were missing. Viking was very helpful. I shipped them the defective card, and they shipped me two 256MB cards. It took them one week, but Viking also recovered 60 of the images that were missing for me. I estimate that I lost less than 10 images all together. However helpful Viking was, the card was defective, and the whole experience probably cost me 10 hours of time. Unfortunately, one of the 256 MB card has corrupted as well.

The Simple card on the other hand, just worked. No Card ERROR, no problem in uploading into the computer, the way it should be. It has been 3 months.

Rating:
Summary: Not For Use in a Garmin GPS
Review: I put this card in my Garmin 2610 GPS and it worked for a couple days and now the GPS can't find any information on the card. It works in my camera and my reader can read it, but the GPS can't. It'll read my old 256 MB card, but not this one. I don't know if it's a compatability issue or what, but they don't seem to want to connect.

Rating:
Summary: Not a bad card for the price
Review: I've had three Viking Compact Flash cards now that I've used with two cameras: a Canon Digital Elph S330 and Powershot G5. Although people have reported seemingly higher-than-average failures and errors with Viking's cards, neither of my 128MB cards or the 512MB I have for my Powershot have ever had a problem.

However, Viking doesn't exactly make the fastest cards on the market; higher resolution camera users will find the limited (1.5 Mb/s) transfer rate way too slow unless their cameras have a fairly large buffer; users needing exceptional speed may be advised to purchase a Sandisk Ultra II card (or better). Still, Viking's cards are an exceptional value for the price.

Rating:
Summary: Not great, but not bad
Review: I think a lot of people will give this thing 5 stars cause it holds a lot ... but you know that already, and it's absurd to write about that. So I'll just get this out of the way - yes, this card is 512 megs. Yes, it holds a lot.

Now as for it's quality... I use this card in my Powershot S200 digital camera, and have had some problems with it... occassionaly, it has caused the camera to give an error when it starts up. The card seems to go through 'bad streaks', in which every picture I put on it gets corrupted, for maybe 10 pics in a row.. then it works fine again. Besides this problem, I probably lose 1 in 200 to 300 pictures due to data corruption.

Personally, I take several pictures of any given object, and if one gets lost, it's no big deal. So this occasional data loss has not really been a problem for me. If the pictures or data you will store on this *are* very important, you may want to think twice before buying a Viking.

I have also used this in my Sharp Zaurus, and it has never caused any problems there.

I'll give it 3 stars because most of the time it works fine, and the problems i have had with it haven't been anything serious.

Rating:
Summary: Beware rebate
Review: Getting them to honor the rebate was a battle.

After 8 weeks, they informed me by e-mail that it was rejected.

It took a phone call to the CEO's office (no kidding) and another 8 weeks to get the rebate check.

Otherwise, the card has worked ok, but is probably on the slow side.

Rating:
Summary: DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT!
Review: I purchased the Viking 512K card, and have had no end of problems. It has consistently failed me and crashed my computer when trying to download pictured from the card (via a card reader) to my laptop. I have tried it on countless other computers with countless other card readers and have had no end of problems. For months Viking would not honor their warantee, and finally they sent me two different replacement cards and they have all had the same problem, I spoke with a manager at a company that specializes in recovering data from different types of digital camera cards, and she said that Viking cards are known to be garbage. Please save yourself and your photos endless headaches and do NOT buy this card!

Rating:
Summary: Good card, Good price
Review: I've been really pleased with this card, especially for the price. The only reason I would not get this card is if you are going to be doing a lot of high resolution sequence shots. Then I would get one of the Scandisk Ultra II cards with the 9mb write speed. This is a great card for point and shoot cameras, but you can only get about a frame per second or a little better when shooting a 8 x 10 superfine resolutions with a Canon A70.

Rating:
Summary: This card works for me in my Sony PDA
Review: Viking CF512M 512 MB CompactFlash Card works in my pda flawlessly. I have stored around 60 mp3 songs and they sound really good to me.I also bought an USB compact flash reader
which helps me to move around my data in the same Compact flash
card.Sandisk 512 MB flash memory costs $119 which does the same thing but doesnt fit in my PDA.
In general I am happy with the card.