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Crappyline. In/around December, 2005, I bought an LED light and a couple flash readers from Crappyline. The light arrived DoA, and Crappyline would send me a new one only if I paid shipping. Light was about $4. Shipping would be about $5. No thanks. The readers worked about 15 times each. By then the 30- or 60-day period with Crappyline had ended. SoL. (Oh, and the readers fried the pictures on the SD cards I inserted. Thanks, Crappyline!!!) I don't know if they have improved since then, but I would doubt it. How do you have any quality control at $3 for a reader? Cheap ChiCom crap. Not that by Chinese I mean to impugn a particular ethnicity (I think most of Asian decent kick American-mutt academic butt). It's just that China The Country has billions of people and needs them to do something - like make non-conforming goods to sell to its enemy the stupid Americans. So do you want to send your last few dollars to the ChiComs? Have more fun and less disappointment by just torching a fiver. Or, you could embrace hope and change order 2 and put them in your enemy's water bottle. Like the adulterated Chinese protein powder with added melamine, or the toothpaste with antifreeze, these readers probably have some chemical undesirable for the motherland. Perhaps extra mercury or lead paint. Poq Gai, Crappyline.

I hear ya #1, but trouble is, where can I buy a good quality SDHC reader? China makes some crappy products, but Americans aren't even making anything like this anymore...

Another crappy Chinese product I'm looking to find a good quality build of is a USB to Serial converter. I used to be able to buy a really good one with a FTDI chip that had excellent performance. Now all I can get are crappy Chinese hack jobs with crappy transceivers that either don't work at all or work very poorly.

My HP laptop had a built in SD reader that worked pretty well. But I got a new Thinkpad laptop at work, so I gave away my HP laptop to someone less fortunate who needed a computer. I'm not going to go buy a whole new HP laptop just for a good SD reader.

Bring back good old American engineering and manufacturing. Plug up the broken patent system and stop giving class action lawyers huge cash awards for "bringing justice" to the consumer in the form of worthless coupons. Redirect worthless financial bailouts into scholarships for science, engineering, and medical students -- its insane how much money we expect students to pay up front for a good education these days. This kind of crap just makes it impossible for America to make anything good anymore.

Hey guys, I bought this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820223087

Granted, it's $6, not $3, but it's worked with everything and I've never had an issue with it or Newegg.

Good luck.

I'm using the $6.00 CF/SD/etc reader from deal extreme. Very fast, very good, very Korean. (The newegg one above doesn't do CF). Similar thing at sprawlmart is $11.00.

It's only $3 and $0 shipping. It seems cheap enough to try out. If it works, then great! If it doesn't, it was only $3.

#2, class action suits are no longer allowed to be settled by coupons, or discounts, or additional product, or anything similar. They HAVE to be cash money to the people in the class.

The attorneys still make out like bandits, of course, but at least the people who were screwed get SOMETHING now.

FYI

Meritscum and Ben have an excremental relationship. Play with dirt, get dirty. I also had an experience reminiscent of #1. Meritline is the armpit of the net.

On the other hand, I've been very satisfied with my orders from Dealextreme. Plus they have great prices and ship free. Company is in Hong Kong. Generally, I've found Hong Kong merchants to be reliable and scrupulous.

Ben has gotten dirtied up promoting the likes of this Mscum, and other (I suspect "gohart and drive" which is reminiscent of a 12 inch prosthesis from a porno movie).

#6 Good to know, although I'd still rather not have these class action suits. All of the class action suits I've gotten letters about in the past two years are for really dumb issues that have never caused me any real trouble. I'd much rather have my dollars going towards corporations developing newer, better technology than have my dollars redirected to pay off some useless attorneys.

As we're all sure to be learning soon, the dollar itself is worthless. It's only the products and technology that you can buy that makes a dollar worth anything.

When you get a new cheap card reader do not give it a test run by popping in a valuable higher capacity flash card with important pics on it, throw in that 256MB empty flash card from 2004 instead and preferrably plug it into a USB hub with fused ports instead of directly into the mainboard (some mainboards won't just blow the port they will suffer southbridge controller or power switch transistor damage if a defective USB device is plugged directly into it).