Customer Reviews

Kingston 2 GB Elite Pro Secure Digital Memory Card ( SD/2GB-S )

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I've bought some of these cards for my various Canon P&S cameras, and gifted some too. Never had a data problem, ever. I've always bought them from Amazon.com (with amazon.com as the seller, not a third party).

I use one of the cards in an underwater housing-enclosed camera. Another in a camera I reserve for rough use when my DSLR might be in jeopardy from rain, snow, etc. They work great for long movies as well as hundreds of photos.

I haven't had a single Kingston SD card fail me yet. I look for Sandisk, but very often Kingston offers more performance for the price and honestly, I'll go for whichever is cheaper at the time. I like inexpensive, but not at the cost of quality. Kingston is a very reliable alternative to Sandisk if the price happens to be better.

Purchased for my Canon SD700 is. Very quick compared to the standard SanDisk that I used w/ my old Optio S. Speed makes a world of difference when recording videos, scrolling through pics via the camera LCD, etc... I was hesitant to buy considering there were no reviews but I'm glad I took the low investment plunge. Great price & definitely does the trick.

I bought this memory card for my camera sd500. At first, I was very dispointed when I only see 1gb on my laptop. After googled around, I realized I need to update my laptop sd reader driver to recognized sd card that is over 1gb. I'm able to see full 2gb after driver update. Just make sure you update your device/laptop firmware/driver first.

I bought the 2GB Elite Pro Kingston card about 6 months ago, plugged it in, turned it on (in a Canon S3IS), and it has worked flawlessly. At full resolution, it will pack 706 images onto the card. It is fast to record and to read back. I just returned from Thailand with the card full of images that are excellent. I will very soon by another 2GB Kingston SD card.

What most people are not aware of, is that there are two distinct Flash RAM technologies: one is SLC (single level cell) and the other is MLC (multiple level cell). Without getting into the technical details of these technologies, the consumer should know that MLC offers savings to the manufacturer, because MLC Flash can store more data on the same surface as SLC. However, this saving translates into a net loss for the consumer, as MLC have a rewrite cycle count of 5000-10.000, while SLC have above 100.000 (mostly considered to be around 1.000.000). If you only plan on saving your data just a few times on the same medium, whether it's MLC or SLC will not make much difference. However, if you plan on using it as an external storage in a netbook (such as, keep it in the SD adapter slot continually, and use it as an additional solid state drive, SSD), I would strongly recommend an SLC card.

However, manufacturers have abused the users' ignorance on just how much more reliable SLC is compared to MLC, and have introduced the MLC devices to increase their margins without informing anyone how much worse a deal they get. In this climate of high competition, almost all manufacturers of Flash devices have switched to MLC. Thus it is commendable to find a select few who still offer the option of buying an SLC device.

If you need a larger SLC storage and Compact Flash is an option, I recommend Kingston's Elite Pro CF line of cards - they, too, are made with SLC technology.

I picked up this card to replace a slower 1GB card I have. I've used it in 2 cameras, and it works fine in both. It is definitely faster than the standard
speed SD cards that I have. I'm sure it's not as fast as some of the newer cards that are out there now, but it is a good compromise of price and performance.

As far as memory cards go, the industry is pretty well saturated with numerous labels. This is the third or fourth SD memory card I have purchased. I came within a week and work well out of the box and will be used to supplement another 2GB SD card that advertised at 144x. The Kingston Elite Pro at 50x for the most part performed as well as my Patriot 2GB 144x SD. Certainly eons better than the a SD card that I purchased from Outpost, which didnot work at all and had to pay to ship it back. What make this a great consumer experience is buying from Amazon is literally seamless and painless. Outpost may not really care, the buying experience through them has convince me never to consider Outpost for any future purchase.

I bought this card a few months ago for my Casio Exlim Z55 camera. The price was attractive for a 2GB card and it came with a card reader. Like other reviewers, the card was fine in the beginning. However, the card is now corrupt and I have lost some precious memories of my baby captured since February 2007.

Recently, we took a lot of photos and some videos during a family vacation in Hawaii. After taking a photo of my 1 year old son, my camera suddenly returned an error saying that it was unable to display the image. After that, whenever I tried to take a new photo, my camera would capture the photo, flash the photo in the display for a split second, and then return the same error. I was only slightly concerned at the time because I was still able to review previous photos and videos I had taken. I waited until I got home to troubleshoot.

When I got home, I was able to read the SD card in my macbook ONCE. When I tried to read it a second time, it could not recognize the card. I then tried to read it on my Windows PC. I was unable to see my photos or videos. I ran a couple of DOS commands and saw that the card had 500MB occupied on it, so I suspected my photos were still in there somewhere. I quickly googled for cardrecovery software. (I purchased something from www.cardrecovery.com for about $40. It scans your card and then allows you to preview the photos before you purchase the software. However, you cannot preview videos.) Luckily, I was able to recover most, if not all of my photos. I was not as lucky with the videos as they were all cut short. I was only able to recover incomplete footage. It wasn't until I ran the software that I realized I was missing more files than I knew about. When I first turned on my camera in Hawaii, my photos went back to May. Turns out I was missing over 100 images dating back to February! There were videos of my son when he was learning how to crawl. The sad part is I was only able to recover much shorter versions of the videos, but it is better than nothing. Also, I was able to recover a lot of photos.

At this point, I have not formatted my card. I am waiting to call Kingston Tech Support to see what they'll say. I originally emailed them from the Kingston website and received this response:

"For a replacement and data recovery contact tech support by phone at 800-435-0640, M-F, 6am-6pm PST and ask for level 2."

I am hoping that somehow they can help me recover my videos completely. Before Kingston, all I used were SD cards from SanDisk (1GB and smaller), which I never had problems with. I don't think I will ever buy Kingston again.

Please do not buy this product. It worked well for just a few weeks (3 or so) and then right in the middle of our Las Vegas trip when I had almost 1GB of pictures taken on that day, with 1 more GB to go it just died. It gave a memory card error and my camera was unable to read or write into it. I plugged it into my computer and the computer failed to get any data out of it too. I bought a new SD card and my camera worked just fine. So I lost all the memories of our trip in just a second. I got an RMA from Kingston where they replace the broken card but you are responsible for shipping it to and from them. The total shipping cost would be approximately 10$. I am not sure whether its worth it because you might get another card that might die again on you when other brands are available for just $20...

I purchased this with a new digital camera and it's working great so far. Be careful with buying the cheapest card you can buy because you'll want the speed of these slightly more expensive ones. This one happens to be 50x which is plenty for my 7 megapixel digicam.