Review on SanDisk ImageMate Memory Reader SDDR 89 A15 by Michael Godo

Ordered on Tuesday, asked for free super saver shipping, was supposed to be dispatched in a week, received only 2 days later! So, 10 stars to Amazon for the amazingly fast free shipping! Well, for the reader. I took off a star not because of the short extra USB cable (that can be considered a travel plus as others have pointed out) but because the damn thing is wobbly! The pedestal it stands on has too small a base and the handles are not very good. The consequence of this is that the device with a card reader is too heavy! Hit it gently and it will fall! The yellow LED is too big, bright, and angled to hit your eyes, so that's a major downside. (I'll probably use black tape to cover most of it.) As some have also pointed out, you need to position the card accurately for it to fit, but I think that means everything is tight. Oh, the slots are labeled too, but they're in small print and the text is upside down when the reader is on the stand, so you'll have to grab this thing and hold it horizontally. (If you don't know what I mean, look at the picture!) It might almost work better if it was constructed with feet on the horizontal bottom of the unit and not even a pedestal (although I'm sure some People like it for the desk space - but at only 3 3/4 inches wide it doesn't take up much space at all!). Finally, in the cons category, the packaging is that awful molded plastic with sealed edges that requires scissors to open, resulting in jagged and sharp edges, which frankly is an expected accident. We urgently need European packaging and recycling laws. so that we can send this ridiculous packaging back to the company at their expense. Shame on Sandisk for using it. Last but not least, it's all the real little things that lead to losing a star. On the plus side, it has short but sweet instructions and works great even when plugged into a 4-port unpowered hub! But how does it work? "Would I buy it again? Incredibly good and absolutely yes. All the rave reviews good. It hit the mark. At first I was concerned that when I inserted a memory card (also the main reason for buying it was to have two specialized readers replace one for Compact Flash and one for SD cards) seemed to transfer files from the card was slow WINTER OLYMPICS So I decided to measure the SD transfer time by comparing the speed of my Palm SD card reader and this 12 -in-1 device compared. My 256 megabyte Panasonic SD card contains 730 elements in 172.6 megabytes. I decided to run the palm reader first, so if there's any advantage, let's say first run caching , unlikely this would help 12-in-1 TIME TEST RESULTS: Well the competition was incredible Good preparation for the Winter Olympics Here are the specs for 2 consecutive tests After 2M minutes the Palm Reader transferred 95 megabytes compared to 92.7 megabytes for the 12-in-1. In the 3rd minute it was an absolute draw. The 12-in-1 then blew gold with an incredible bang at the end, completing a 172.6 MB transfer in 3 minutes 50 seconds compared to 4 minutes 3 for the Palm Reader. [Just out of curiosity, I measured the transfer time of the memory card today. At just 51.8 megabytes, a 128-megabyte Lexar flash drive in 12-in-1 took a sluggish, turtle-like 3 minutes and 31 seconds. This is hardly Sandisk's fault; instead suggests that memory cards have much slower transfer speeds!] I searched and searched for a well-reviewed memory card reader that worked well. It meets all requirements. I can't wait to do a card-to-card transfer! So buy it, you won't be disappointed. -------- Well it's October and I've found a REAL PROBLEM! This damn thing can't read the Lexar 512mb Memory Stick Pro! My Clie reads well but the card reader doesn't show anything! Looking through the comments here, I see that someone else has found a similar issue with Lexar MS Pro cards! BAD, SANDISK, VERY VERY BAD. SO I GIVE TWO STARS!