Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Jessops USB SmartMedia Reader
The Jessops USB SmartMedia adaptor gives you fast access to your digital photos. How well does it work?
| Product | USB SmartMedia Reader |
|---|---|
| Company | Jessops |
| Web | www.jessops.co.uk |
| Price | £29.95 |
| We like | |
| We don't like | |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
One of the bugbears of digital photography is having to wait ages for the pictures to slowly transfer down a serial lead from your camera to the PC. With cards as large as 128Mb now available, this can take an hour or more. You can drastically cut this time down though by using a SmartMedia adapter which connects directly to the PC, bypassing the camera and serial lead to allow high speed downloading of the images to your hard drive.
Jessops are well known in the UK High street as purveyors of all things photographic. As well as selling a vast range of products from different manufacturers, they also have their own branded products. The SmartMedia Reader is one such device. It is actually a reader and writer and comes in a blister pack containing the device itself plus an installation CD and a USB extension cable.
In Use
Setting it up is straightforward. Simply load the drivers from the CD and you're done, no reboot required, which makes a nice change. If your USB ports are at the back of the PC, you can use the extension cable to make it easier plugging and unplugging the device. Once connected it appears as a new drive in Windows Explorer. You can then insert and remove SmartMedia cards as required. Each time you insert a new card, you need to press F5 to refresh the drive contents to see what is on the new card.
My cards were created using an Olympus 2000Z. The images appeared in a subdirectory and could then be copied wherever I wanted. Equally, images from the hard drive could be copied to the SmartMedia card.
Speed wise it was impressive and copied pictures pretty much at the maximum speed for a USB device. A 16Mb card which normally took around twenty minutes or more to copy using a serial lead copied in about thirty seconds via the adapter.
One slight niggle was that when you have finished with the adapter, you do need to manually 'stop' the device using a small applet before removing it. Just pulling it out could result in the machine crashing. This is more of a Windows limitation than anything lacking in the design of the unit though.
Drivers are provided for Windows 98/Me/2000 as well Apple Mac OS 8.5 or higher and the unit can cope with SmartMedia cards up to 128Mb in size.
The CD also included a copy of Piccolo 2.0 which is an image manipulation program that costs around £25 on its own. Piccolo is designed to tidy up and tweak digital photos. Finally, you can make use of Jessop's Internet printing facility should you want to go for high quality prints from your SmartMedia cards.
Conclusion
If you're still struggling with a serial lead between your digital camera and PC, you could do far worse than consider the Jessops SmartMedia reader both for its convenience and speed. At just £29.95 it's excellent value for money too.
