From the perspective of someone in Hong Kong who recently bought Lexar's "top of the line" CF card, I think LEXR is potentially a "short" candidate.
Lexar's products are sold at a premium (in my case, about 50% more than a generic card with the same capacity), but do not offer adequate "value for the money".
The 1GB 32x write-accelerated CF card was released prematurely, being incompatible with Nikon D1h and D1x digital SLRs due to a frequent and annoying lock-up problem. Recently, Lexar announced the problem publicly, and is urging owners to send their cards back for a firmware upgrade. The cards which have this problem number in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Three problems - each one of them has the potential to dissuade purchasers of Lexar products.
The "locked up" card has the potential to lose all data. For professionals who rely on the card for their livelihood, this is unacceptable. Fortunately, Lexar provides software to help retrieve data from the locked up card. Unfortunately, the software is extremely slow (requiring nearly 30 minutes to retrieve the data) and very buggy (retrieved data is sometimes corrupted).
Lexar's customer service sucks. They have a "live chat" tab which puts the owner in touch with some outsourced service people in India through e-mail, but they are not knowledgable enough about the product, and can only provide the most elementary of solutions. Ultimately, they ask that the owner call a telephone number at Lexar headquarters in the USA. And you know what that means... endless encounters with a phone answering machine - no real human being to talk to.
Obtaining a return authorization number takes a couple of days (though e-mail), and the owner has to pay round-trip postage plus insurance. The costs are not trivial - in my case, it may amount to over US$60.
I regret having bought Lexar's card, and having paid US$300 for the privilege of getting such a huge headache ! |
