I am sick of theslow serial connector on PDR-M1 and would like to invest in either a PCMCIA adapter or Floppy Disk Adapater for SmartMedia. Which one of them is better as far as speed and reliability go? They both seem to in the range of $60-$70, so please help me decide!

Thanks in advance

-Rajesh

-- Rajesh Khera (mrkhera@gsb.uchicago.edu), March 08, 1999

Answers

AFAIK you have 3 choices: an external reader, a pcmcia adaptor, or the floppy adaptor.

I have a parallel port based external reader that works very well. It's manufactured by Lexar and reads an 8MB smartmedia in about 15 seconds. It also has a pass-through connector for a printer and comes with software and two keyboard cable pass-throughs(One for PS2, one for normal) that are used to provide the unit with power from a computer's keyboard connector. Cost is currently $35-45 if you check prices at www.shopper.com, searching for: lexar smartmedia reader. If your laptop has keyboard & parallel port connectors you can use the reader with it, but it's not as elegant as the other two options.

The pcmcia adaptors are available from several manufacturers. Prices vary. I've seen them for as low as $42, and they've been auctioned on www.ebay.com for less. I understand that they're faster than the parallel reader, but then 15 seconds for 8MB's is pretty quick. Some units only work with the older 5 volt smartmedia cards, or only up to 8MB cards. The newer ones read both 5V & 3.3V cards in sizes up to 16MB. I would have bought one purely for convenience's sake if I had a laptop with pcmcia slots back when I bought my reader.

The only thing I know about the third choice, the floppy adapter, is that the price is currently higher than the readers and that you can pretty much find a machine anywhere with a floppy drive to stick it in. Of course, you'd still have to install software to use it and I don't know why you'd want to leave pictures on someone else's machine or drag around a portable drive or a stack of floppies?

I guess the bottom line is that if you're going to use it on a desktop, cost is the only real factor at play. If you're toting a laptop, the pcmcia adaptor would be tough to beat for cost and convenience.

Good luck.

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), March 08, 1999.

PS. If you search www.shopper.com for: smartmedia pc card you'll find several pcmcia smartmedia adaptor units in stock from severabl vendors for under $40 each. Plus shipping. :-)

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), March 09, 1999.

If you can readily use PCMCIA, it is the way to go. A zillion times faster than the other methods, easy and convenient.

-- Benoit (foo@bar.com), March 09, 1999.

i got a flashpath adapter free with my purchase of an oly d400z. it was not compatable with my laptop. they exchanged it for the pcmcia card adapter and i don't really see anything more convenient. single images seem to transfer in about 2 seconds or less. now all i do is pull the smartmedia card form my camera and pop it into the laptop. how easy can you get?

-- buddy hardy (bud5201@aol.com), March 27, 1999.