Digital cameras, some printers, indeed some scanners now all take digital media to make your life easier, for printing, editing and organizing your data on smart media cards. To get them on your PC you can use data cables supplied with the product or there's an easier way, card readers! Now different manufacturers use different types of card and media, all designed to get you to part with your hard earned cash after you already paid out on the product itself, and indeed as prices on the smart cards also drops, its nice to have something you can edit volumes of, without to much hassle. So, to combat that, here's a card reader, and its 6 in 1 to cover all the bases!  Now first things first, smart media comes as mentioned in a variety of formats and sizes, thats memory size as well as card physical size. IBM even do a 'micro drive' system, its common on laptops (PCMCIA) and the likes and it has to be said that its a rather good system for digital imagery, and most probably why its on this card reader too.  Now the card reader has four slots for the six types of media, and you should take note of any orientation tabs on the media you insert. Typically its gold side up with the cut out to the far right, if you get it wrong you cannot insert the card all the way. The card should sit almost flush with the edge of the reader if inserted correctly. Right, connection, and here's where it got interesting, you simply plug the unit into the USB port and let it detect it, on win98 AND on Win2k you have to install the drivers, on XP you dont have to, it brings up some icons if you do that allows the unit to function properly. Without them it wont read any cards so if you cant get a result, install the drivers. On the CD menu select the correct card reader you have and take the name from the box to ensure you get the right drivers set as they all seem very similar. After thats done in explorer you get a set of icons to let you identify the media type and it shows as removable storage.
 As you can see, its easy to recognize which media type is allocated where, compact flash, memory stick, smart media etc. The four slots in the front go in a clockwise order, our smart media card, from all places our modems answering machine slotted into the lower right hole as its smart media. (For those of you wondering we have an olitec smart memory pro that has a compact flash unit built in for answering machine messages and the likes)
The unit is compact and pocket size, its barely bigger than credit card, the cable plugs neatly into the back of the unit and it needs no external power so for laptop use it could be handy as well, for professional photographers and the likes for snapping on one memory card while the other copies across to the drive would be VERY handy. But why just store images on it, why not data too ? With the prices for a 64mb Smart media card at around ˘G12 in the UK its worth getting a few for the camera and for data, share a set of images with a text document of when and where it was taken even, to help you catalog and organize the data. Transfer MP3's on them, documents, anything you like really. Dont feel limited by it, its a versatile media that fits in a pocket or envelope for posting very easily and cheaply and its fast. 
A few points to remember, when you disconnect the unit you must right click the icon in the system tray and select unplug or eject hardware to disconnect the reader NOT any of the cards. You can remove the cards at any time as long as the green light is not flashing orange as that would mean its transferring data to one of the cards. Removing it at this point may damage the card or you may just lose data. The card reader is a great tool and covers all of the memory bases on the market today, and even lets you transfer data from one card while you use another in the camera or on the printer to run off the first set of prints. The media card prices are indeed dropping and with a little investment like this, you can store, share, edit and take more pictures than ever before, far simpler too !! |
