Last March I purchased a Concord Digital Eye-Q Duo 2000 camera, which I wrote a favorable review of. I've been very happy with this camera, but the one disappointing aspect, in the long-run, was that to get the data off of my SD media cards, I had to hook the camera up to my computer via the internal USB 1.1 ports on my 233MHz AMD K-6 computer. Transfer was SLOOOOOWWWWW to say the least - I use my camera weekly to take over 300 photos for pro wrestling organizations, and fans want to see these results in color yesterday! The experience didn't get much faster when I added a USB 2.0 High-Speed card to the computer, because the camera's interface was only USB 1.1. So I craved MORE POWER.

Remember those nice, nifty Best Buy Bux from the latest round of McDonald's Monopoly game? I had a client who gave me $18 worth of those, and I immediately knew what I wanted. I wanted an external USB 2.0 media reader to make my experience sing.

The media reader I settled on was a SanDisk SD/MMC USB 2.0 Media Card Reader. It was on special for $19.95 S/H. After applying my free bucks, I ended up paying about $9 for it to be shipped to my home over Christmas. I knew I wouldn't get it before Christmas, but I was very excited nontheless to receive it.

It's a basic, no-frills media reader. You hook it up via your USB port. If you run WinME/2K/XP or MacOS 9/X or Linux then this thing will instantly configure for you, it's ready to rock. If you run Win98/98SE (Win95b/c has inadequate and incomplete USB support, Win95a & NT has NO support), then you need to install the included driver, which takes just seconds. After that, you just stick in your media and go.

The device is USB 2.0 high-speed compatible, so if you have a USB 2.0 high-speed port in your computer, your files will transfer at 480Mb/s. If you just have USB 2.0 (not high-speed), it's a little slower, and if you have USB 1.1 then you transfer at 11Mb/s. As with all USB 2.0 devices, it's backwards compatible down to USB 1.1, which means you can use this device on practically any computer that ships with USB since 1997 or so.

The only indicator on the drive that data is transferring is a combo red/green LED on the top of the device. A little annoying if you mount this device someplace high or out of your vision where you can't see it blink, but it doesn't really provide that much functionality anyhow, it's a "verblinkenlighten" as it's known inside geek circles (because "voos doo not tooocha da bottons, jus' watchen verblinkenlighen" *lol*).

I've recently upgraded my experience with this device, as I picked up my new HP Pavilion XL946 from a friend's business. The computer is completely matched in silver and smoke grey from the monitor to the speakers to the keyboard to the tower to the drives ... and thankfully the media reader is also silver and smoke grey! PERFECT MATCH! Take that for your PC fung-shei! With Windows 2000 and a USB 2.0 High-Speed port, this thing just SIIIIIINGS. I'm very happy with it.

Recommended: Yes