Hello OutaDaDark ,
Don´t panic! The pictures you were referring are only commercial and marketing photos of SanDisk products, in this kind of pictures you will not see the serial number printed and the “made in china” phrase, because each card has a different number.
Those pictures are taken by Amazon from the SanDisk website here. As you will see these are high quality photos but not real. The only way to check if the card is genuine is once you have received it and look for the s/n in the front, the s/n can be checked from SanDisk website and they can tell you if is genuine or not.
Here is the real picture (look at the s/n printed and the “made in china” ,genuine cards must have both ) :
In Amazon there are a lot of sellers (we do sell on Amazon ;-) offering the same item in the same listing at different prices. I´ve seen that some sellers are selling the microSD 32GB card from 28 GBP that is really rare because the price for DISTRIBUTORS of that card is around 27GBP + VAT.
Here is the listingof the microSD 32Gb card on AmazonUK
Where is the trick? How some sellers can offer this card at 30GBP? Easy… They sell in “bulk” format, that means the card goes without retail package and in such case you will never know 100% if your card is brand new or used or… hacked. In that case my advice is to buy from trusted sellers, and to buy only RETAIL PACKED items from SanDisk.
As far as I know SanDisk only sell in “bulk” to the mobile manufacturers (HTC, Samsung, Nokia, etc…) so they can put the cards in the same box when you buy a unlocked cellphone. Of course there are many distributors who can import these cards in bulk and sell them at very cheap price, but these are NOT OFFICIAL selling channels and are not under full control of SanDisk distribution channels.
On the other hand most of the microSD 32GB cards you can find on eBay from China are fakes, that means the card is hacked and apparently shows 32GB in Windows SO when it really has 4-8GB of real capacity.
I don´t think you will find fakes on Amazon because they have an strict policy regarding the counterfeits, but in order to avoid future complaints or problems, my advice is that sometimes is worth the money to spend a bit more and buying from a trusted seller.
For you information the part number of the microSD 32Gb card is: SDSDQM-032G-B35 these cards are found in class-2 and from July 2011 all the cards come now in class-4. (but the real thing is that both cards have the same write speed, around 5MB/s)
If you are looking for a microSD 32GB card with high speed transfer rate I will tell you that maybe by the end of September SanDisk will launch the microSD HC Ultra in 32GB , the SanDisk ultra cards can reach up to 15MB/s.
Let me know if any more help needed!
Bye!
