Smartdisk FlashTrax 20GB

I have shopped many times with warehouseexpress.com, and when I noticed a portable storage device in AP that seemed to be what I was after, I ordered it. The item in question was a "Smartdisk FlashTrax 20gb" portable hard drive, and it arrived quick enough, although I was not surprised by how quick they were to debit my account!

I opened the product and fired it up, thats when things went downhill. In trying it out, I found it would not recognise one of my compact flash cards. An error message indicated 'no card inserted or not formatted' but when put back into my camera I had no problems, the camera recognising photographs on the card. I tried another card containing images, and was disappointed that it could read the TIFF files?

I looked through the destruction manual, and was quite shocked to find no answer to the unit not recognising my card, and even more shocked to find that the unit would not read TIFF files without an 'auto thumbnail'? Of this problem there was nothing indicated in any promo material either in AP or on the suppliers website. I felt that if it was good enough for Mr. Rouse, then it should meet my needs.

My camera does not shoot in RAW mode, and in order to maximise quality, I shoot primarily in TIFF format. Converting to shooting only in JPEG is simply not what I want to be limited to. I want a unit that is up to the job and this unit simply did not meet my requirements. Had the TIFF problem been identified on the website, I would not have ordered it in the first place.

The inadequate unit was returned to the supplier and guess what, yep, they stiffed me for both the postage costs. So having paid for the outward postage, I was forced to pay again to return the unit! Now you would have thought that as the unit was being returned unfit for my purpose, that the good people at warehouseexpress would have at least met me half way, and refunded the return postage. But oh no, they only do that when something is returned faulty. The fact that the unit did not meet what it was supplied for, matters little. The so called customer service department just brushed it off.

The moral of this story is make 100% sure that what you are ordering from them is something you are very familiar with, and definitely do not order expecting them to play fair if you have to return anything. I will never use the sordid company again.