Lifesaver In A Box

You thought Lifesavers came in little paper rolls? Well the Assorted Fruit and Pep-O-Mint ones might, but you can get other sorts of lifesavers too, and photography sometimes needs them. As we get further from the early start days of digital, we distance ourselves from any number of memory storage formats and devices. Here's a Sony Mavica that washed up on the shores of Camera Electronic's Murray Street store. Note the big slot for floppy disks. I can't even begin to imagine how many bytes it might have contained, but I'll bet it was several. There were other proprietary formats of the time that banged on for some time but fell into desuetude eventually when the major makers agreed to concentrate on a few designs. Of course every now and then a maverick breaks free from the herd...generally to feed some top-of-the-line camera, but the experience is sometimes a fraught one. Big cards and new cards sometimes mean hard-to-find cards. Sometimes they are not-quite-ready for release cards. But back to the older bits. The SD slot on the back of your computer or the side of your TV can only do so much. CF slots are getting rarer, but they still show up in some older devices. Micro SD is common now, nd so on. However, it is rare to find some way of reading all these formats on one device, and rare to have that device be a reliable one from a major maker. Well, you can stop panicking if you have some of these older, odder cards. SanDisk still makes the ImageMate All-in-One reader and you can get the images you thought were locked into the old cards. And you get them as fast as anyone ever will - this is a USB 3.0 reader with up to 500 MB/s interface. Not that any of the older cards will run anywhere near that...but at least the limitation will be the card, not the reader. it will pass: a. CF b. SDHC c. SDXC UHS-1 d. MMC e. Micro SDHC f. Micro SDXC g. MS h. PRO i. Duo j. PRODuo Darned if I know what many of those are. Good luck if you do. The reader is well-built and sets magnetically onto a neat metal tripod stand to clear desk space. Now no names and no pack drill, but my experience of SanDisk readers is very good, in comparison to others. Granted, I did pour coffee into mine, and I cannot think that it did it good, but as long as you are prepared to operate it sensibly, you should get a long happy life out of it.