SIIG USB SmartMedia Reader/Writer
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If there's one thing that's wrong with my C-2000 Zoom, it's that it takes a horrifically long time to download the images from the camera using the serial cable. Running at 115Kbps, downloading all the data from a full 32MB SmartMedia card seems to proceed at a glacial pace. It's a shame that when faster interfaces like USB and Firewire exist, digital cameras seem to be slow in offering them as a way to download the images.
The solution to this frustration is at hand, however. Numerous versions of SmartMedia readers are on the market, using various interfaces. For people who use both Compact Flash and SmartMedia, combination readers are available which can read both media.
The one I have is made by SIIG, Inc. It has a USB interface, rather than a parallel interface. In theory, if you set a parallel port to the right mode, a SmartMedia reader connected to it will be faster than a USB reader. It turns out that I don't care. As long as the USB reader is acceptably fast, the practical advantages of a USB device make it a major win as far as I'm concerned.
In practice, my SmartMedia reader/writer may end up being connected to any one of three machines: 1) my main desktop machine, 2) my laptop, or 3) in a pinch, my wife's laptop. All three machines have a USB port available. Of those three machines, only one has a parallel port handy. To get a parallel port on the other two machines, I'd have to either add a parallel port to the main machine (the existing one is used for a printer) or else attach the port expander to my laptop. That's just too much hassle when USB works so well, especially when I expect to move it around from machine to machine as needed.
Even better, the USB reader is parasitically powered, so I can connect it to my little laptop in the field, and it works just fine. My laptop has plenty of mass storage available, so I think that's pretty handy. I can also use the nice laptop screen to preview images, another benefit.
Reading a 5 MB TIFF file off an Olympus Smartmedia card takes about 12 seconds. I'm sure that's not the fastest reader around, but it's fast enough. It beats the serial line all hollow.
Installing the reader was astonishingly simple - I inserted the driver diskette, and ran the install utility, which copied the drivers onto my desktop machine. The install reboots the machine once, probably more out of paranoia than anything else. After rebooting the machine, I plugged the reader cable into the USB port. Viola! Win98 detects the device, finds the drivers, installs them, and everything works. No muss, no fuss, no stretch marks. To install it on my laptop, I accessed the same diskette over my local area network and it worked just fine.
Once Win98 does the initial setup for the device, you can unplug it and plug it in at will, without rebooting and without turning anything off I've moved it from my desktop machine to my laptop and back repeatedly without a hitch .
When it's plugged in, the USB reader appears to Win98 to be just another disk drive with removable media. To copy the images off the Smartmedia card, you pop the SmartMedia card into the slot in the reader, open up the Smartmedia 'disk' with Explorer, and just drag and drop to your heart's content. The file attributes like size and modification time are the size and exposure time for the image. The whole things works just like a floppy drive, only a whole lot faster and with a whole lot more storage (and no whirring, clicking, etc.)
Even better, because the interface is a removable media file system, I can use the network sharing to share the SmartMedia reader across my local network. Life is very good, indeed.
In addition to copying files from the SmartMedia cards to my PC, you can also use the file system interface to delete files, rename files, and copy files ONTO the smartmedia card.