Hiya, I just bought an Olympus C-2000 (awesome awesome camera) and an Olympus MA-1U PC Card Adapter (pcmcia) to go with it. It reads my 8 meg card just fine, but has problems with my 32 mb card. I've heard this is a limitation with the driver software, although I don't remember ever *INSTALLING* and driver software for it (I have a '98 Powerbook G3 Series laptop).

I have also heard that Toshiba has a beta driver for Macs that allow it to read 16 MB cards. So, I have 2 questions:

(1) Will is work with 32 MB cards and, (2) Is the Toshiba driver actually an update to one of the Mac-default system drivers to allow the OS to read bigger cards, or is it some other stand-alone application? I don't really want to inadvertantly install beta software over what might be a non-beta system file.

Thanks in advance for any questions you can provide. One other thing, is there a good C-2000 only web page on the web (other than Olympus's page, something like a fan page). If not, I might start one :)

Mike

-- Mike R. Manzano (lynx@poboxes.com), August 29, 1999

Answers

You know what's funny? I'm having a similar problem on my Win98 machine with a NewMedia SmartMedia adapter. Good ol' plug 'n play detects 8Mb cards in the adapter fine but won't let me access 32Mb cards (driver loads, no drive letter assigned). Is there something funky about how these 32Mb cards are formatted??? Sorry I don't have an answer for you, but I feel your pain...

-- (anson@marimba.com), September 02, 1999.

FYI, not expecting anything, I booted my laptop into Windows 2000 RC1, actually my main environment and not Win98 as above, and the NewMedia adapter worked fine reading a 32Mb SmartMedia card! It looks like there's an incompatibility with Win98's IDE driver. W2K uses a removable drive ATAPI driver instead. So now I'm a happy camper. I haven't tried Win98 SE so I can't say anything there...

-- (anson@marimba.com), September 02, 1999.

How fast is the pcmcia card reader compared to scsi and usb?

-- Stephen (castines@bellatlantic.net), September 02, 1999.

According to the NewMedia specs, up to 8MB/sec reading to host, up to 20MB/sec writing to card. Forgetting about the specs for a second, from personal experience, it is damned fast! Perceived speed is definitely faster than file transfers on my IDE hard drive! This certainly blows away a USB connection. Best hardware purchase I've made in a long time. I also have a floppy disk adapter that was sent free with my camera, and although it is many times faster than a serial connection, it doesn't come close to the PCMCIA adapter. Anyone want a floppy disk adapter cheap? :-)

-- (anson@marimba.com), September 03, 1999.