Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(21 customer reviews) 94 of 94 people found the following review helpful
It works... sort of.,
March 14, 2004 Tom Verbeure (Cupertino, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White) (Electronics)
I bought this product to store the RAW Canon Digital Rebel photos of my Australia trip. Instead of buying a set of expensive flash cards, I kept my 2 512 MB flash cards and copied the results at the end of the day.
The good:
In the end, it worked and saved me a lot of money, since I already owned an iPod.
The bad: where do I start?
- Copying 512 MB of data almost completely drains the iPod battery. Don't even think about copying more. It doesn't give you a good piece of mind to see the battery indicator go down quickly. Quickly, I decided to fill up the flashcard up to 75% capacity, to have some margin.
- It's EXTREMELY slow. 26 minutes for 512 MB. Not really an issue for me, since I never took more than 50 pictures/day, but other may find this a problem.
- Media Reader battery usage. A set of 4 AAA allowed me to copy roughly 10 512 MB copies. When the batteries run out, everything still seems to work fine until it stops after, say, 12 of the 50 pictures...Read more
45 of 46 people found the following review helpful
NOT quick,
March 6, 2004 Paul Bramer (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White) (Electronics)
Read the advert carefully: "transfer the pictures quickly via FireWire technology". The Firewire port is used but the transfer is really at USB1 (or less) speeds. Since both the reader and iPod must run on batteries, the slow speed and rapid battery drain can become an issue--quickly. The 5-6 minute download for 128MB may be tolerable; the 20-25 minutes for 500MB probably isn't. Brian VanHarlingen, Sr. Technology Manager for Belkin acknowledges this slow speed (see Belkin FAQs or other review sites). Unfortunately, there are currently no alternatives for transferring from camera to iPod (w/o computer).
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Not as fast as they claim,
October 28, 2004 M. Easton "CME" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White) (Electronics)
Though the concept is great, and the controls are straight forward and easy to use, the Belkin Reader falls short of usability.
While out on a location, I was away from a power source and thought the Belkin reader would be a great alternative to lugging a laptop around for file transfers. Trying to transfer 1000 pics off a 1GB CF card was
impossible. The reader would drain a fully charged ipod and still not finish the transfer. Though it claims firewire transfer speeds, I did some tests from home and found otherwise:
100 compressed 2K pics transferred via:
USB1 card reader to computer 1 min 20 sec.
PCMCIA card reader in laptop 45 seconds.
Belkin Media reader 6 min. 45 sec
This was just a simple example. You can see how hundreds of files would take 30 minutes or more. For the price, I'd suggest buying a few more memory cards and not worry about the transfers until you get home, unless you're in no rush and can...Read more