Important Information/Warning Regarding China Double Din's +

I don't know if it's worth stickying this but I've recently had an interesting experience regarding an Erisin double din head unit. I've had a number of Erisin units and they've all been very good, and I can't recommend them enough.

My friend recently asked me to help him buy a double din head unit as his OEM console failed. I suggested Erisin due to their features and seemingly good reliability. I've had 4 now, and not a single one has failed (which is odd considering all I read on the Internet is how China 2Din's fail ). We had a trawl through second hand on eBay as my friend was a tiny bit reluctant to spend too much, but I found a unit listed for Spares/Repair for pretty cheap.

The listing description stated that the SD card reader was broken. Apparently neither the Sat Nav worked, nor the SD Music played because the SD card reader had been broken since Day 1 and Erisin refused to replace it as they'd received it twice and both times it had worked correctly in their factory. I could tell there was an element of anger in this guys writing. Anyway, I was quite confused by the listing, see, there are two SD card readers per unit, not one. The audio side of the unit has an SD card reader, which is linked to the main DVD player which is how it plays music, then there is another SD card reader linked the WinCE Mainboard and gives you access to the maps. Is it likely, or even possible that BOTH would have broken? Almost certainly not...

We bought the device at a heavily discounted price due to the supposed broken SD Card reader. My friend said that if the device was genuinely broken, he would use it for the CD/DVD functionality, it's still a good price after all. The device arrived with two SD cards inserted into the unit. We plugged it in and sure enough, the SD Music refused to play. The first song would start and roughly 5 seconds in, the internal software running the DVD player (which has the SD support) would reset and then resume from the beginning of the song. Sat Nav yielded bad results as well. After maybe 30 seconds of running iGo8, the WinCE ROM would throw a Chinese looking error with the name of a bmp file. Each time the bmp was different. Straight away, I figured that the software was simply botched, so I loaded a fresh version of iGo Primo, but this didn't improve the situation. 5 minutes into simulating a navigation, another error was thrown (memory error), and the nav unit simply reset.

I examined the SD Card's that came with the device and quickly noticed something odd. They were both 'SanDisk', but they didn't look genuine whatsoever. I'm not a SanDisk salesman, or enthusiast, but I know what a SanDisk SD card looks like, and not only did the logo look wrong, but there was no indication of the Class (on either) and there was no serial number on the back which SanDisk are known to supply all their memory with. We took a trip down the shops and bought two genuine 8GB SanDisk SD cards. We loaded the first one with music and the second one with a fresh copy of iGo Primo 2.4 with all the latest maps.

The result?

Perfect navigation with no errors, and a SMS Text Message from my friend saying "been listening to the music on way to work this morning, working perfectly".

Clearly both the SD cards supplied by Erisin were not up to scratch. I've never had a problem myself with the SD cards supplied by Erisin, but I assume they purchase these from local suppliers and perhaps this was a bad batch. My advice would be consider replacing all supplied SD cards when your device arrives as you can't be guaranteed of the quality! It'll save you selling it on eBay and losing £100 (in the case of the unfortunate fellow who sold it to us).

Hope this helps anyone thinking of binning their device due to SD issues.

Useful info! Thank you!!
And well done !


I remember (don't ask me details) that our advise has been replacing the SD card. Sometimes it helps.
SD's can be damaged, faulty, .... A format can solve it or not. SD's are cheap too. I think it's the first time I do see a bad batch. Maybe Erisin got that batch cheap and did not test (what maybe they should have done)?
Anyway, bad luck for the first owner, an opportunity for your friend and a good tip on this forum!

nabi wrote:Useful info! Thank you!!
And well done !


I remember (don't ask me details) that our advise has been replacing the SD card. Sometimes it helps.
SD's can be damaged, faulty, .... A format can solve it or not. SD's are cheap too. I think it's the first time I do see a bad batch. Maybe Erisin got that batch cheap and did not test (what maybe they should have done)?
Anyway, bad luck for the first owner, an opportunity for your friend and a good tip on this forum!

There is a possibility that the SD cards were damaged in transit, but seeing as they were probably supplied inserted into the unit I find it odd that they would fail due to that. I didn't try formatting it, maybe I should later on.
SD cards are cheap to buy but they are cheap to fake too. There are companies selling very fake, poor quality SD cards all on eBay for pennies and their data retention is dreadful I imagine. I just recommend sticking to the good brands, Transcend, SanDisk, Verbatim, Kingston, you can't go wrong and they aren't that expensive. It cost us something like £18 for two MicroSD's. Would have been cheaper if we'd bought them online!!

Your friend still has a cheap device, second hand. And you don't know how the SD's were shipped originally or what the previous owner did to them.
And seen the fact SD's are cheap to fake, It should take selling a lot to see a minimal profit. Hmm, possible. Better to stay away on any sale when the price is to good to be true.

Of course, the money he paid made up for the savings regarding the SD card ;)

It's funny, my own Erisin SD packed up yesterday. I put some more software on it and it corrupted. It got very hot and failed which isn't good because my TMC settings were on there, hope I can get them back.

I'm not quite sure where this should go in the forums, a moderator can redirect it as they think fit.

Erisin 7" 2-din GPS head unit (and probably others judging from posts here and there).

There is a programming flaw in the firmware that disables the auto shut down on ignition off.

Do NOT choose (1) None as this does NOT SHUT THE SYSTEM DOWN. It is essentially unprogrammed and leaves the machine on full power but blanks the screen and even worse on ignition "on" does a complete restart.

Chose 10mins (probably the other time settings will do as well).

The current drawn on "none" was approx 700mA with ignition off and did not change with time.
With (2) "Ten minutes", the current drawn after ign off was about 400mA but dropped to zero after 10 minutes.

I hope this information is useful for some users.