All About Exposure Control

Dave's Favorites: Dazzle 6-in-1 Reader

Perhaps you're like me and have a bunch of portable devices. If so, you may have a hard time getting data from all those devices to the PC and back again. One easy solution is to use the USB cables that came with your various gadgets. But if you have one or two digital cameras, an MP3 player, a digital camcorder, a PDA, or even a digital voice recorder, the cables can get out of hand. Personally, I hate cables. I tend to lose them, anyway--actually, I think my cats drag them off. It's a lot easier to simply pop the memory card out of your device and insert it into your PC, where you can drag and drop files as needed.

But therein lies the rub: Most computers don't have built-in slots for memory cards. Even if they did, which kind of card would the slot support? It's not enough that we have CompactFlash and SmartMedia; we also have two or three kinds of Memory Stick, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and more. If every device in your house potentially uses a different kind of memory card, is there an easy way to transfer data?

Yep. Go get Dazzle's 6-in-1 Reader, a small card reader that sits on your desktop and handles every major type of memory card on the market, including CompactFlash, Microdrive, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and Memory Stick. It doesn't handle the brand-new XD memory, but there are only a handful of cameras that use that format.

The best part is that Dazzle's reader doesn't need drivers--just plug it into your PC's USB port and it automatically configures itself. That makes it easy to install and even easier to move between computers or to take on a trip.

When I last checked, Dazzle's card reader cost as little as $36 on PCWorld.com's Product Finder.