As most of the people already know, Sony's Memory Stick Pro Duo card is the format for both Sony digital camera and Sony PSP.  In additional, Sony does not manufacture its memory card anymore.  As holiday season is coming, I would like to point out few factors and few suggestions for USA consumers as many customers have already complaint to us.  Price for memory card is dropping almost every month.  However, there is no such thing as buying a Memory Stick Pro Duo 1GB for as low as 50 USD.  The cheapest I have seen was if some big guys are dumping goods in order to turn into cash.  However, that does not happen on a lot of sellers.  What I would like to point out is believe or not, there are fake Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo out on the market and it is happening on ebay.  These are not made by Sony nor made by anybody authorized by Sony.  They are being manufactured in Hong Kong and China.  The major difference is "stabilities".  Rather or not memory card will be able to run with over thousands of “cycles” or read/write.  This type of card might not fail after few read or write.  But after thousands of use, this type of card cannot be use anymore.  When that happens, you cannot return this card to any USA Sony because card does not contain the same serial number which is hard coded onto the chip itself.  This normally happen when trying to receive saved games.  Genuine memory cards are extremely hard to tell.  Not until you open up the card, you cannot see if it is genuine or not. 

It might sounds scary as I am going to tell you that our customers have shown us memory cards from overseas that can be detected as 1GB card but when 900MB file is stored it will then no long be able to open that file.  It happens because it is not a real Sony memory card.  It is because the chip inside of this so called 1GB card might be only 256MB chip.  It is then hard coded as 1GB.  Since computer is so easy to be fooled, it can actually read the hard coding and turn it into a 1GB card.  However it is then became a problem because a 900MB file cannot store on a 256MB chip it is impossible.  Does not matter how much you compress, it is impossible to do so.  Therefore, when you buy a card, it might not be detectable unless you store a real large file.  However what you have to remember is a 512MB chip can only store about 496MB information it is because of the different definition between “Mega” and “Kilo” among hardware manufacture and software writer. 

The best way to do is buy from a well known source with ability to provide information such as manufacture info, or warranty info.