Lexar Jumpshot SmartMedia Reader -- get your pics fast.
Written: Jan 10 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: inexpensive, easy hookup
Cons: possible to insert card upside down
The Bottom Line: While there are a few flaws, the Lexar SmartMedia reader is a great peripheral to have for SmartMedia card users.
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| kurt_g's Full Review: Lexar Media SmartMedia USB Reader |
I own an Olympus C-2000 digital camera, which I have written a review of. The C-2000 offers only serial downloads, which are way, way slow. This had bothered me for a long time. So when I was at Target, I noticed a pile of Lexar Jumpshot SmartMedia readers for $30 apiece. I figured it had to beat the plodding speed of the serial download, so I threw it in the cart.
The Lexar Jumpshot SmartMedia Reader is a pretty simple device. There's the reader, which comes in translucent plastic in the shade of your choice. It's small and can easily be carried with the camera in the camera bag. It came with a CD containing a utility program and drivers. While the Epinions category identifies this as the 'Lexar Media SmartMedia Reader', the picture above is clearly the same things as the 'Lexar Jumpshot SmartMedia Reader' -- the characteristic shape is the same. Methinks Epinions did not name it correctly.
It installed without a hitch on both Windows 98 and Windows 2000. (My machine is dual-boot.) Once hooked up, the reader appears as a removeable drive in your Windows Explorer or My Computer menu. From there, moving files off your SmartMedia card is as simple as drag and drop. (Or you could always use 'move *.*' for the hard-core DOS people, I guess.)
Downloads with this thing blow away the serial connection. By an order of magnitude. It's great for saving battery life on the camera, since you don't need to have the camera on in order to pull the pictures off it. You just pull out the card, put it in the reader, and go. The reader comes with a green light. When you stick a card in and it reads it, the light blinks. When it's steady, it means you can move files. When you are moving files, the light blinks again. So: blinky light means activity, steady light means you're ready to do something. Ingenious so far.
In Windows 98, you can simply pull out the card when you're done. In Windows 2000, you can't do this without the computer getting annoyed and alerting you with several querulous alerts, complaining that you did so without stopping the drive. However, it's not hard to configure the system to allow you to stop the drive at any time. I'm not sure if this is the fault of the reader or Windows 2000. This is an annoyance -- I enjoyed the ability to simply yank the card out and stick it back in the camera -- but not too bad, all things considered.
The problem with this reader that I do consider a greater issue is that it is possible to put the card in upside down. How hard could it have been to make it so you couldn't put it in wrong? Or at the least, label it? More than once, I've put it in upside down and waited for the little green light to come on. It's just poor engineering, really. Because of this, I can only rate this as an average product.
Still, I recommend the Jumpshot SmartMedia Reader to anyone who has a digital camera that uses SmartMedia cards. While newer cameras tend to be USB, this allows you to save the battery power of your camera, since you don't need to have it on in order to download. For an older camera with serial downloads, this is vital to your enjoyment.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kurt_g
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Location: Brick, NJ
Reviews written: 116
Trusted by: 38 members
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