I'm upgrading digital cameras and am trying to decide between Nikon 950 and Olympus C-2000. I travel a lot, shoot a lot of pictures, and travel with my cameras plus laptop. Which camera (compact flash/smartmedia) is easier to shoot a lot and then download the same to a laptop? I shoot for a minimim of 2 weeks at a time before heading home to play with the pictures. Do you have a better idea for storage than dragging a laptop?

Shalom, Neal Bierling

-- Neal Bierling (nbierlin@juno.com), February 27, 1999

Answers

PCMCIA adaptors for both smartmedia and compact flash are readily available. Transfer to laptop is exceedingly fast, faster than any other method including USB, parallel port, and even SCSI. Dragging a laptop is a great storage option for travel.

-- Benoit (foo@bar.com), March 01, 1999.

So how do you get the pictures from your notebook to your desktop? I'd sure hate to do digital photo editing on a notebook.

Laplink cables are as slow as the serial ports they are connected to.

It is beyond me why I can't find a simple external card reader that connects to a SCSI or ISA bus directly.

-- Doug Green (dougjgreen@yahoo.com), March 01, 1999.

Why don't you wait and get the latest Sony digital camera, the DSC-D700. It uses standard available up to 224MB ATA type II Flash PC cards priced at $180 each. The Simple Technology and Antec in addition to many others sell the internal PCMCIA card reader for the desktop PC (controller uses one ISA slot). So you can take as many pictures as you like on 2 or 3 of these 224MB cards and transfer the pictures to you PC or Notebook via PCMCIA port. You can use the Explorer within Windows to drag & drop the photos in desired location of your desktop PC.

-- Fred Tabarrok (tabarrok@ariver.com), March 02, 1999.

Doug green: you can get scsi readers, but they're $$$. To connect laptop to PC, ethernet is great. :)

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

I'm aware of the INTERNAL PCMCIA card readers from Antec and others. The problem is, I don't have an available drive bay in my PC. (the 4 bays contain: 2 HDs, a CD-ROM, and a 3.5 floppy) That's why I need an EXTERNAL PCMCIA or CF reader. card reader for my desktop. I cannot believe that nobody seems to make such a thing. I guess I have no choice but to get a parallel port or USB-based reader, even though they are much slower than PCMCIA.

-- Doug Green (Dougjgreen@yahoo.com), March 09, 1999.

I wanted to reply to the comment about parallel port readers being way slower than the pcmcia reader. I have both types and that statement is incorrect. I own both the SanDisk and the Lexar reader and they are the same speed (give or take a few milliseconds) as the pcmcia card reader. Now the serial cable method is waaay slow; but the others are essentially the same speed. Go for the most convenient/least expensive. (My experience with SanDisk with win 98 and NT was ragged; the Lexar was flawless and easier to operate). RG

-- Richard A. Gibson (gibsonr@erols.com), March 10, 1999.

I keep hearing that a PCMCIA card reader can transfer an entire 48 MB Flash card's contents into a PC in a FEW SECONDS, while a Parallel Port card reader will certainly take at least a couple of minutes. Is that not correct? Note - I am not talking about a PCMCIA card reader into a parallel port or into USB, but rather, direct PCMCIA into the system bus, or into SCSI.

-- Doug Green (dougjgreen@yahoo.com), March 10, 1999.

Doug,

2 simple answers.

One, the parallel port readers are reasonably fast in that I can transfer an 8MB smartmedia into my tower(slightly overclocked 266MHZ K6) or my laptop (66mhz @ 50% speed) and write it to hard disk in about 15 seconds. NOTE, that I said, "AND WRITE IT TO HARD DISK." Since the parallel port on the typical PC is essentially hung off the ISA bus as an 8 bit wide port it's pretty quick. SCSI is pretty much the same thing in terms of how it's physically connected to the bus. Admittedly, a PCI based scsi card may be a bit quicker, but I bet the video card or hard disk controller hogs your pci bus anyhow. What it comes down to is that I'll bet the speed limit is actually a function of the hard disk transfer and other bus traffic as much as anything. Probably Windoze too. zzzzzzzzzzzz. I'd guess an ISA bus card running a pcmcia socket wouldn't be much faster than the parallel port and frankly, what's a minute to transfer 32MB of pics? Hell, have a donut. You earned it taking 32MB's of pics. :-) Often we spend so much time figuring out how to make our favorite hot rod faster that we forget to take it out for a spin... -from a guy who's on his third set of metaphorical wrenches.

Two, why not buy a tower case with a bunch of room for drives and drop your system into it? I did last summer, and now I have drive bays to spare. It's almost a no-brainer and rarely takes more than an hour or two, even for neat freaks or the terminally spastic. If you're technically challenged there's usually a teenager around somewhere. Just unplug their sega, walkman, RIO, internet ready pc, electron microscopy kit, or Adventures in Cloning Starter Set and wave a phillips head screwdriver at 'em... :-) While you're at it, have 'em install that pcmcia reader.

(Please, no more cards, letters or comments from "The Commitee for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Terminally Spastic." I can't read your writing anyhow...) :P

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), March 10, 1999.

Not only am I NOT technically challenged, I have probably built more leading edge PCs than you would care to hear about, as I used to put together next generation trade show demos for a company that made high-end multimedia/graphics and floating point ICs. And I am presently a marketing director for another semiconductor company that makes leading edge video processing ICs. The fact is, I am seeking a solution that is simple and logical and available off the shelf for a range of customers. There is nothing stopping me from building my own PC from the ground up for my own use, except that it would not be the type of commonsense, turnkey solution that I am seeking so that other users could easily replicate it without my having to hold their hands and support it. I am resigned to the fact that for most users, a parallel port card reader or a USB card reader is as good as it gets.

-- Doug Green (dougjgreen@yahoo.com), March 10, 1999.

Let me start out by saying that I am in no way connected with Imaging Resource, so any feet I shoot are my own. (33 years, 10 toes so far...)

I REALLY didn't intend to imply anything about YOUR(I intended the bit about grabbing a teenager to do a hardware install for the average techno-paranoid that might read it -I once dealt with a guy who wouldn't change a light bulb and another that I had to drive 300 miles round trip to change fuses for) technical expertise(I'll admit I'm used to dealing with people with somewhat less than mine, but then I've designed and built microcontroller based systems for fun, designed and interfaced the hardware and written the multi-threaded C code for entire industrial control systems, built electronic devices since I was about 12, and am currently formulating a theory concerning how offline or "subconscious" processing might aid an artificial intelligence in deciding which information should be retained in finite storage and which should be discarded or offloaded to offline storage), but I'm reasonably confident that anyone with your level of expertise and industry involvement would agree that plugging a cable into a parallel port would probably be more of a no-brainer for the average consumer than installing an ISA or PCI card to support an external pcmcia card reader. (phew -and the award for the world's most complex sentence goes to...) Let's not even discuss the question of installing software for a port that's standard equipment on practically every pc that exists vs. dealing with setting IRQ's, memory address conflicts, Window's 16 or 32 bit card wizards, etc.

SCSI devices typically completely max. out at 5MB/sec for continuous transfer, and 10MB/sec at burst rates which means even with true scsi speed you're limited to taking 10 or so seconds to read at full bore a 48MB card, assuming the card can furnish the info at so high a rate. Now couple that 5MB/sec bus transfer with another running through the same processor/bus/controller to write it to disk (If you have a scsi hard disk, half that or less for a typical fast IDE) toss in a few gazillion cycles for the glorified graphical mouse driver interface most of us call "Windows" and things probably slow down to parallel port levels again, at best maybe twice as fast, but I doubt it. On the other hand, taking 90 seconds to transfer 48MB of pics that will probably require an hour to review and maybe a day to touch up or edit , if you're picky, really isn't too sloppy. I'm sure I've waited longer than that just to format a 1.44MB floppy... Frankly, I'm sure that speed really isn't an issue, since if it was you could easily download one card while using another and hardly ever miss a picture.

All in all, we're probably two guys arguing over the accepted shade of the color "blue", since I doubt the average camera buyer will salivate for one until they're available for the $35-40 that the Lexar parallel units are selling for now. Even then you'd need a $40 adapter to use it with smartmedia cards or a $20 one for compact flash.

One last thought: Have you considered buying an internal pcmcia kit(available at fire sale prices from what I saw at a recent computer show -$65) and running the cable out an empty slot on your pc and simply installing the reader bracket in an external drive case? Presto! Instant External PCMCIA Reader. 10-1 the cable could even be extended a bit(I'd guess 3 feet max) and you'd never have a problem.

If you do it, post some transfer speeds. Good luck.

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), March 11, 1999.

Actually, for my own use, I have been considering doing exactly what you suggested about using an internal PCMCIA card reader which goes to ISA and kludging it to sit outside the PC.

I was just expressing some dismay that this isn't readily available as a product. Given the fact that I keep hearing stories about conflicts between multiple peripherals hanging off of the same logical parallel port using pass-through connectors, i just don't think that that solution is as simple and support-free as it is cracked up to be.

-- Doug Green (dougjgreen@yahoo.com), March 11, 1999.