Failed Delkin Black CFexpress card and great customer support

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Calson

Well-known member
I have had defective XQD cards from Lexar and SanDisk and the manufacturers replaced the ones I mailed to them after they could verify that they had defects. Very different experience with Delkin when one of their Black CFexpress cards had bad sectors. I emailed a copy of the invoice and photos of the front and back of the card and they initiated a replacement that same day.

Some takeaways for me are that Delkin is a good company to support and that I should be using smaller capacity cards for still shooting and that I need to go back to fully testsing my cards before putting them to use. I had a defective CF card and was shooting a wedding with the D3 and there were 3 files that were corrupted. No "money shots" but still a concern. After that I started loading my a new card to capacity and then moving the files from the card to a computer and then opening all the files with a program that would create the screen image from the Raw file and not simply grab the embedded JPG image. It becomes very easy to see if there is a bad section of the card with this process and I only have done this with new cards that I will put in to use. I can see with an important trip that a similar level of certainty that a card is defect free is important.

In my research I also learned that there are compatibilty issues with third party USB 3.1 G2 boards and my ProGrade CFexpress card reader. At least for ASMedia chipsets there are not compliant with PCIe specification 2 requiring PCIe lane negotiation. My card using this chipset would cause the computer to stall while transferring files.
 
Glad your support from Delkin was good.

I had very poor, almost non-existent ”support” from prograde … their CFExpress card was just very very slow….by contrast my Sony XQD was blitz lightening fast! All I got from prograde was that it was their latest card. No offer to test, check or replace…they got their card and reader back by return! I know others have good experience etc etc from prograde….I’m just saying what MY experience was.
 
Wow, you have had a string of bad luck, Knock on wood, I have yet to have a memory card fail. Well, there was that ne I dropped in a cup of hot chocolate... :)

It's good to know that Delikn is a stand-up company. Thanks for the post.
 
Wow, you have had a string of bad luck, Knock on wood, I have yet to have a memory card fail. Well, there was that ne I dropped in a cup of hot chocolate... :)

It's good to know that Delikn is a stand-up company. Thanks for the post.
Delkin has a 48 hour replacement guarantee for their black cards which is pretty impressive. I register mine when I buy them so that I don't have to deal with figuring out when and where I purchased them from.
With that said I've never had a XQD or CFexpress fail on me so it's strange that Calson has had that many go bad on him. I don't shoot wedding either, so maybe he just uses them more often. I have found them to be pretty robust and reliable cards. Its not like he is purchasing no name cards either. They are all what I would say top quality manufacturers.
 
Three cards over a period of 20 years with thousands of image files captured weekly is not a lot. If I lose a couple of images from a card as there are corrupted segments that merits having the card replaced. I had one CF card fail when shooting with the D2 and one XQD with the D500 (and quite a few people had problems with the early XQD cards with this camera), and one CFexpress card with the Z9. Newer cameras with faster data output rates require tighter matching between the write rates of the camera and that of the memory card. Lexar had problems for nearly a year with their first run of XQD cards.
 
Re failures - Back in the day of old CF cards - they occasionally went through the wash in the pocket of a pair of jeans - and just continued working. I wonder how well CF express will do after a good wash :D
 
Three cards over a period of 20 years with thousands of image files captured weekly is not a lot. If I lose a couple of images from a card as there are corrupted segments that merits having the card replaced. I had one CF card fail when shooting with the D2 and one XQD with the D500 (and quite a few people had problems with the early XQD cards with this camera), and one CFexpress card with the Z9. Newer cameras with faster data output rates require tighter matching between the write rates of the camera and that of the memory card. Lexar had problems for nearly a year with their first run of XQD cards.

I have the same experience as you - 3 cards failed over around 20 years. These were CF and SD cards. So far no issues with XQD or CFe.
 
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