Memory-Card-Reader Reviews

If the product's concept could save it - this would have gotten 5 stars. One dongle to read your Memory Stick, Secure Digital Media, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, and IBM Microdrive cards. The produc, in reality, falls flat. It has a hard time trying to read CompactFlash cards, and it WON'T READ SmartMedia cards at all.

Support is a joke, telling me to put the card in another way (didn't help even with the media on which it WAS possible to do so). I guess the only thing I can recommend to everyone is just get a LOT of USB hubs, and run all the dongles for all the media you use - which means if you need a solution for SmartMedia, CompactFlash, SD Media, and Memory Stick, you need a card reader for EACH one of them independantly. The all in one idea of these readers just DON'T work...

The Asante 6 in 1 memory card reader is the so called "Gini"
which made 75 of my pictures disappear from a 128 meg compact flash card.

This device working on Windows XP is incapable of reading more than 1 memory card insertion at a session - in other words if you have more than 1 card of the same type you cannot read the second card without first removing the "Gini" drive and then
restarting it via its USB plug.

Worse, if you use the same card with differant information on it, re-inserting it in the drive will completely screw the file structure of the card, requiring that the card be reformatted.
You know what that means.

No doubt the design is attractive, but the unit is cheaply made,
the SD slot had a bend in the interior metal probably making that slot unuseable.

If you are using 2 types of memory cards try to keep it simple and use a reader specifically designed for those two.

My husband wanted a card reader that worked on PC and Mac. I got thim this and he is exstatic. He tested it and uses it with mulitple cards and XP on his PC and os X on his mac. The previous reviewer must have gotten a bad unit because mine works great with the SD cards we have, no bend in the slot at all.
I have put in up to 3 different types of media at the same time under XP and copied pictures between the cards. When I use different cards of the same type, as long as I eject them (as the manual states) I have never had a directory issue with XP.
I have used this as a fast way to transfer pictures from my camera to the PC w/o having to deal with the slow camera cable!
Both my husband and I enjoy using it. This thanksgiving it was a lifesaver! Kept taking too many pictures!
It looks great, built well, is small and compatct! Everyone should have one of these who has a digital camera.