Flashe Reviews

I love this thing!

I hated PDAs... Had no use for the things, until this little gem came along. Pop it in, load up some maps and you've got a pretty sophisticated GPS in your pocket. Now my PDA is always by my side.

It took a little practice getting used to it, but once I did, I started finding my way to and from places I never would've found before. I drove down to Atlanta and spent nearly a month in unfamiliar roads, but I never got lost.

One of the great things about it is that it's integrated with the Contact Manager (which gets synched by the PDA software with Outlook and AOL contacts), so you can find anyone in your contact list.

Here are a few things you should know:

1. Make sure your PDA has TWO memory slots. One Compact Flash for the Pharos, and the other for you to place a traditional memory card. In my case, my PDA has a second SD memory slot which I keep a 256MB card in that has maps for about 3 states that I travel to.

2. Invest in the optional car kit. It gives you:

a) A car power cord so your unit stays on, for your trip without losing power (it also charges your PDA).

b) A cool little holder to hang your PDA on your air conditioning vents so it stays put when you drive.

c) An external antenna to give you a stronger signal. In my case I generally don't use it.

3. Practice for a bit on familiar turf. You need to know how to re-route yourself in a pinch if you make an incorrect turn. I found that the routing was generally pretty accurate, but often it doesn't have North/South/East/West designations, so it may just say "highway exit ahead", when in fact there is a fork in the exit giving you an East/West choice... so you are forced to look at the screen and make a guess as to which one to pick.

I purchased this card for my Kodak DC3200 and it works great.
It's about 3 to 4 times faster than the 2 Megs of internal
flash memory. I would recommend this card for anyone looking
for faster pictures.

I recently purchased this camera after having a previous samsung for a few years. It takes great pictures and the effects are great. The ad states that it has a switchable panoramic mode which it does not so that was disappointing, but having the panoramic before I never used it much anyway. I would recommend the Samsung Evoca 115 because it has the panoramic, and also has captions you can choose on the pictures which is great when you have kids!

I've had this card for about 1 year, and it still works fine in my Kodak DX4330 camera -- which I've used a lot. 99% of the time I haven't had a problem with this card. Also, SanDisk phone support is excellent!

However, make sure that you can "review" a photo after taking it ... otherwise it means that something has gone wrong and the file is corrupted. Also FYI -- "Unrecognized file format" means that you've run out of memory while recording a video, and the video is lost :( This card only allows 3-4 minutes of video, and if there are photos in the card then the video time allotment is even shorter.

The memory was a good upgrade but I did not like u having to take it out for a modem or something else. Plus it coulkd have been faster.

Most DV Camcorders don;t record well in low lights. Here is the solution, you can record indoors with no grains. Very light weight, battery-powered light. Uses small latest li-ion batteries.

A bit expensive but good quality light. I tried several other cheap lights. no where as good as this.

If you own sony camcorder, NP-FM70 or 90 battery would do. If you don't, get a Lenmar equivalent & Lenmar omnisource charger (which is another 80$ in total).

But you will be pleased overall with Night quality shooting esp if you have a panasonic camcorder, becos panasonic is not very good for indoors. but Panasonic 3ccd is the best for daytime shooting.......so, this light makes it the best for both conditions.

Have Fun !

This flash works fine if you don't want spend lots of money on flash. I had this work good on my Rebel2000 and better than speelite 200e.
It's cheap, not look like pro-Flashs light, but hey works great for me.

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 only 1 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 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.

I popped this into my Canon S100 and with the default resolution, got a reading of 1478 shots available! That's an incredible amt of space and for someone heading off on an extended trip, it should be quite a boon. I have been following CF costs on a dollar-per-meg basis for some time, and while the newest & largest cards have tended to carry a premium, this one does not. It is roughly fifty cents per meg, less than 1/4 of what it cost per meg only 18 months ago!

The Viking card I purchased, is awesome. My photos get onto my computer very fast and the camera seems to work better with this card - (faster times between taking photos). It holds 164 full high resolution photos. If I put my camera on lower settings, it would hold over 300, but I like the fact that I can take 164 huge resolution photos before switching to the next card. Buy three. That's all you'll need for a 2 day trip (if you're trigger happy like me.)
I have purchased Sandisk and Simple Tech compact flash cards and have been disappointed. The Sandisk ones are so slow and take a long time for the card reader to read. The Simple Tech cards I have purchased all fail after time. Half the photo you took is full of electronic letters/colors/lines meaning the cards get corrupt after awhile.

I'm very disappointed at its quality. I give it 2 stars because I think if it doesn't fail, it's the cheapest one on the market.
I used it in my Canon G2 digital camera. I only have the chance to fill it up about 5 times. Yesterday, when I was in a garden to shoot pictures, it started to have CF error on the screen. And it consistantly failed at the location of 128M of 487M even I formatted it. With this experience, I don't have confidence to bring it with me on the trips. I'm buying other brand's cards even they're more expensive.

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.

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...

Very slow (1 hour) to copy to it a folder containing 212 MB of data (5538 files, 1752 folders) with Windows XP.
Zipping up the files into a single ZIP file, it can be copied in about 3 minutes. So there is an issue with the number of files/folders.
This problem does not happen with Windows 2000.

Reading the copied files is fast enough (about 3-4 minutes) under WinXP (or Win2000).

Deleting the files under Windows XP would have taken even longer (about 2 hours), so I re-format it instead (a few seconds).
This problem does not happen with Windows 2000.

Thanks to a great message from "samthewebman" he found that re-formatting the USB drive as NTFS instead of FAT32 (default) or FAT, resolved the problem in his case (another brand of Flash Drive). I will try this tonight.

I have had this device for about a week, and it has been very useful to me, with no problems accessing data.

However, there are a couple of points that I would like to mention...

The packaging for the device stated that data encrypting software was included. I did not find any software included with my device, and so had to download it from the Sandisk website. It's only a small download, I have to admit, but Sandisk shouldn't say that something is included in the box, if it isn't!

The other thing I noticed is that although the device is a 256MB drive, this is not the actual amount of data I am able to store as there is some space allocated for formatting. This appears to be 3MB per 64MB of storage, so in this case 12MB is used, resulting in there being 244MB left for my data.

This might not be too much of a problem for most users, but it's something to bear in mind if you are expecting to be able to move files that are slightly larger than 244MB, for instance!

I have had one of these for about 3 years, and in that three years I have had Zero problems with it. It is fast, easy to use, Windows auto detects it and installes the necessary drivers, and it is small enough for my applications.