Viking CF256M 256 MB CompactFlash Card

Rating:
Summary: Was I just lucky? I don't think so.
Review: I'd not seen all the bad reviews...and I carried not one but four 256 Vikings on a trip-of-a-lifetime to the Galapagos Islands, February 2004. I came back with wonderful memories and about 200 pictures taken w/ my Nikon 995. Closeups and tele shots w/ the 3X adapter. The other 200 (and some video) were taken w/ SD cards in my Minolta Dimage. Underwater pics courtesy of it's dive case.

No problems at all with any Viking cards.

The last major vacation I took was 1992 to Hawaii, and all 12 rolls of film I shot were trashed by a developing machine malfunction.

Bugger film. I'm a digital boy from now on. A full Olympus OM kit, OM-1n, OM-2, 310 flash, lenses from 21mm to 400mm for sale soon.

Rating:
Summary: Viking CF256M 256 MB CompactFlash Card
Review: I have had this card for nearly four months now, I have taken well over 1000 photos with it, and I'm quite happy with it. This is the first CF card I have owned, so I have little to compare it to, but it's plenty fast for me and I have yet to lose a single photo with it or have any problems at all. I know other people have complained about these, but my experience has been great. And for the price I paid ($50 minus $15 rebate), it can't be beat. I had no problem with the rebate, either. It did take nearly 3 months to arrive, but it got here.

Rating:
Summary: 2 YEARS AND STILL GOING ...
Review: If cost and not speed is important, then this would be great for you. After I take hundreds of pictures and clips, I just download it into my computer. I'd just walk away and come back to my computer. I dont need to see every picture being downloaded until its all finished. How fast is faster anyway? 1 minute? So far (2 years) and still working {{{knock on wood}}}, so this is reliable. {{{REBATES}}} You can also check out Scandisk and Viking CF. You can always wait for the rebate also, but be careful. Make sure you have enough time to recieve your item and to send back for the rebate (most gives you one month from purchase, not the day you recieve the Compactflash card.

Rating:
Summary: Works Great
Review: If you have a 4 megapixel or less camera this is a great card for you (larger resolution cameras typically need faster cards so you can take pictures quickly).

I have a couple of these and have tried them in a number of cameras with no problems: currently they are in my Canon S400 Elph.

You can transfer pictures to your PC via your camera's transfer cable and software, via a CF to PCMCIA converter (if you have a laptop) or via an external USB compact flash reader (for PC's with a USB slot), alternatively you can print the photos directly if you have a photo printer with CF slot.

Rating:
Summary: Effective product
Review: There isn't much to this product or this review...I consider it a pass/fail test and it passes because it seems to work perfectly in storing my photos. I use it in a Canon Powershot A70.

Other than having much more storage, the card does not seem to perform any better or worse than the standard 16MB card that Canon included with the camera.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money.
Review: Worked okay with Nikon 995 taking still shots, refresh rate good. Shot some quicktime clips of son's first t-ball practice and they can't be viewed when downloaded to PC or Mac. Clips can only be viewed on camera. What good is that? They are lost forever! I don't recommend Viking at all. This CF is a piece of junk. I've since tossed the Viking and gone back to my trusty Lexar. Take it from me and stick with Lexar. They make, by far, the best, fastest and most reliable CF memory cards.

Rating:
Summary: For those who have lost photos on their Viking card...
Review: This is a follow up on an earlier post where I reported my really bad experience with my Viking flash card. Two different Viking 256k CF cards, two different cameras. This product is totally unreliable. My first card failed after taking a weeks worth of pictures on a Costa Rica vacation (argh!). The replacement warranty card (no way I would have PAID for a second one!) randomly loses pictures with a corrupt data error. I have reformatted my 2nd card and I still randomly and intermittently lose pictures. Maybe from Viking's perspective of someone in the business of strip mining CF cards, this is an acceptable failure rate, but when you are counting on this thing to record precious memories, I promise you'll which you had spent a couple bucks more on a card you trust.

[...]

Rating:
Summary: Quite simply, this is a piece of crap...
Review: I've been throught two of these cards, with terrible results both times and in two different cameras. I bought my card before a family vacation to Costa Rica and had the card fail a week into the trip. After a lot of research, I found a company that would physically take the card apart, put the memory into a card with a good i/o and retrieve these precious photos... at a fairly hefty expense. I sent the pieces back to Viking with a warranty claim. They promptly sent me a replacement and damned if photos didn't randomly start having data errors. These problems have been on two different cameras.. a Kodak CD3400 and my new camera, a Canon Powershot S400. I'm off on another family vacation in two weeks and I've got to buy a replacement for this card because my confidence is shot.

Rating:
Summary: To nulei from Boston, MA
Review: The number of pictures you can take with your camera depends on what resolution and compression you use. Since you said you are only getting about 100 shots, you are probably on 1600x1200 with SF compression. Try lowering these settings. It is not the CF card's fault that you do not RTFM.

Rating:
Summary: If you cherish your memories, DO NOT BUY THIS JUNK
Review: I would give this product zero stars if I could. It has failed me not once, but TWICE.

I first bought this product in September of 2002, right before I went on a one-month trip to Europe. I bought it because it was the cheapest 256 MB memory card available. I didn't have any problems with it during the trip, and ended up taking over 1000 pictures. When I got back though, a few of the pictures on the card had become corrupted (I got a "Corrupted data" error when I tried to view them in my camera). Those pictures were lost forever. I thought that the card had developed bad sectors somehow, so I reformatted it. After a few more months of usage, the memory card stopped working completely. My camera's playback mode would report that it was empty, but the autoshoot mode would report that it was almost full. My camera also could not reformat the card anymore, so I returned it to Viking and got a replacement. The replacement seemed to work OK, although I didn't use it much.

Then in June of 2003, I wanted to buy an additional 256 MB memory card because I was going to spend the whole summer in Europe, and I didn't think the one Viking card I had was going to be enough. The Viking cards were still the cheapest, but after my experience with the original Viking card, I decided to be safe and paid more money for a SimpleTech card. That ended up being one of the best decisions that I have made in my life. The SimpleTech card worked flawlessly for the first half of my trip. Then when it became full, I switched to the replacement Viking card. It worked fine for a couple of days, but on the third day I ran into problems. Some shots that I took ended up being corrupted right away, and then later in the day, shots that I had taken earlier became corrupted too. Then the card just stopped working, as my camera could no longer save to it. It was really unfortunate, because I was on the amazing Norway in a Nutshell tour, and I missed a lot of spectacular photo opportunities. The next day I found a cybercafe with a memory card reader and CD burner, so I put the images on my SimpleTech card onto CD and just reused it. I had no more problems for the rest of my trip.

When I got home, I tried to download the 3 days' worth of images from the Viking card. I was able to download most of the images from the first two days, but I wasn't able to access the images from the third day. I contacted Viking technical support and asked them if they could recover the images for me. They told me that they do not have any data recovery facilities (are you kidding me?) and that I should search on the internet myself for either a program or a company that could recover the images. So I found a freeware program called Digital Image Recovery, and it was only able to salvage about 5 pictures. I think I lost around 40 or so pictures. :-( I actually feel a little fortunate that the Viking card failed so quickly. Had it worked for a longer period of time and then failed, then I could have lost several weeks' worth of pictures.

So I have had two Viking cards go bad on me - both the original and the replacement. Now I know why their products are cheap and they offer rebates. I will never again buy a Viking product. I would not even recommend their products to my worst enemy. And not only is the quality of their products really poor, but they cannot even be bothered to try to help you recover your pictures when their product goes bad. What a terrible company.