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 saved over 300 photos on this card at this point and was concerned enough to switch to the SimpleTech card and saved 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 70 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 4 months.