Experience with 5 photo-recovery programs

A family member accidently reformatted the SD card in her camera, thus losing all the photos from a holiday. I said I'd try and recover them and googled for photo recovery software, and tried 5 of them out.

Luckily they all allowed me to try before buying, just not saving the found images in the free version.

Here is an overview of my experience.

Digital Leo mmcard Recovery

Cost: $27
- Slow, 1000 sectors per sec
+ Preview files as they are found
+ Finds mpg, jpg
- gets filenames wrong
+ reports corrupted files

Cardrecovery

Cost: €30
+ reasonably fast
+ gives estimate of how long it is going to take
- asks questions you may not know (type of camera etc)
- only finds one kind of file
+ gets filenames right
- no preview while scanning
+ preview after scan
- can't preview big files (10Mb+)
- bad browse interface (select file name, press preview and get preview of 6 photos)
+ good overview of steps to perform
+ reports corrupted files

PhotoOne recovery

Cost: $25
- Didn't work (it couldn't read disk)

FileRecoveryTools for SD

Cost: $50
+ fast
- no preview of images or filenames
- only tells you how many it has found, not what, nor filename
- no pre idea of corrupted files

Smart Data Recovery

Cost: $50
- scanned very quickly (seconds) but found nothing.