Let me turn this around on you. You're making a claim that the Komputerbay card is just as good, that we have no evidence otherwise, and that the well-known brands with solid reputations are engaging in scare tactics.
What evidence do you have of that claim? What do you really know about how Komputerbay manufactures and tests their chips?
I do not know what Lexar and SanDisk actually do -- nor can I contrast that against what Komputerbay does. But what I do know is that we get a lot of people who compalin of memory card failure and a substantial percentage of the time it's due to a bad card... and typically a lesser brand. Those who buy good cards don't seem to have nearly so many problems.
Given that the cost of memory cards is pretty cheap EVEN when it's a top-name card, how much sense does it really make to take a risk in exchange for saving a few pennies per gigabyte?
I consider that if someone buys a DSLR camera, they expect a better experience and a higher quality product -- after all a person could have purcahsed a point & shoot or just use the phone built into the camera if saving money is the primary motivation for product choice.
When someone comes to this forum and they ask for advice based on the best practices of experienced users and experienced users tell them that one of their best practices is to use quality component with a proven track record, the person is getting the advice that they asked to receieve.
You can argue that it's bad advice, but you'd being arguing against a lot of well-established photographers -- this is hardly the only online photography website that would have given a similar answer. Most serious photographers (not just pros... passionate amateurs fall into the same category) give similar advice when I've seen questions such as this one arise elsewhere.
The process of "writing" to flash memory is a physically destructive process. A "read" is non-destructive, but you get a limited number of "writes" before the memory location fails. It's sort of like the tires on your car. After a few trips around the block on brand new tires, you can hardly notice any wear has occurred at all... but technically we know that some wear has occurred and after enough mileage those tires will need to be replaced. Flash memory works the same way and, like tires, some are actually better than others.
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
