Yes, we have the same target on the old-school TMS and it also rates it as 2, however, it *feels* like the Vuforia 1.5 client recognizes it more readily than the Vuforia 2.0 client, but that's purely subjective and I certainly can't back that up with hard data.  I'm probably hallucinating on that since I would assume the local target recognition is the same.  It's probably giving this impression simply because the cloud reco is so much better on these targets.

The downside of the disparity is that we run the risk of user-level perception of my original issue - a mid-to-low quality target is quickly identified by the cloud that subsequently requires rabbit-ear-antenna gymnastics on the part of the user to pick it up locally.

One thing I've noticed is that one of my older phones (an HTC G2 running Gingerbread) seems much more likely to pick up this target than a couple of newer (but cheaper quality) phones running ICS - my guess is that it's more a function of camera quality than anything else.  I take a closer look to see if it seems to be picking up more features in the "scanner" mode, all else being equal.

The Cloud Reco service is capable of more robust detection. Did you try running them through the TMS as well?

OK, on more rigorous testing, it appears I am able to recognize these targets locally, but it's *much* more picky than the recognition by the cloud.

So, probably a false alarm.

Be sure that you're using the latest sample version as well. 

I definitely see the hit in the QCAR_onUpdate() handler - I'll need to add some more logging in the local target matching code.

Have you confirmed this in your logs? - that the resulting trackable is never detected.

You can try re-provisioning them, but that shouldn't make a difference.