Customer Reviews

Belkin Media Reader with Dock Connector for iPod (White)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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 on the card. There's no indication at all about what happened.
- Software Robustness. From time to time, it wouldn't start copying or stop in the middle of a copying session. Restarting always solved the problem, but if this happened at the end, your iPod battery might already be drained by then.

Conclusion: it worked for me, but I can only recommend it if you are really really cash strapped, are a amateur who doesn't shoot that much and already own an iPod with some spare gigabyte. Otherwise you just don't bother.

Tom

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).

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 charge up the ipod regularly.

So I just purchased the reader to take on a trip figured it would be nice to have. Well not so nice if you have the ipod video because it's not compatible so just a heads up if you are going to buy this item.

Just returned from a two week trip to Europe and am very glad I didn't rely on Belkin Media Reader exclusively. Don't even think of trying this with anything larger than a 512mb card, and even then, it will drain your entire battery right in front of your eyes. The issue for me, however, was that I would occassionally get error messages stating "card read error, download aborted," or something to that effect. It would happen about 1/3 of the time, and in the middle of the upload (i.e., the first 30 pictures would go fine, then it would hang up at the same point each time). My guess is that I occassional used my Canon S500 to take small mpeg videos, and the Belkin reader couldn't handle those. If you have relatively small cards and stick to jpegs, you should be OK. Now, incidentally, the battery life of on my 4G ipod is only about 8 hours vs. the 12 hours advertised. Good idea, but not ready for prime time yet. Glad I was able to back up to CDs at Italian photo stores.

I bought a Video IPOD 60gb and when I connected the Belkin Media Reader to it an error message popped up and said that the device currently connected is NOT compatable with this IPOD. So, I guess it is for OLDER IPODs (3G) only.

Yes, it isn't very fast (about half or a third as fast as uploading to the computer in my experience) and it does tax the iPod battery, both negative qualities.... but its not as bad as some have said, and it definitely works as advertised.

To be honest though, I've only used it with 256MB cards, but I've used it for 6MP full size .jpgs (about 2.5MB) AND for RAW files (~6MB) from a Nikon D70 and it works equally fine for both. The RAW files obviously take longer, but there are less of them per card, so big deal.

Just as a rough estimation, I'd guess I could transfer somewhere between 1-2 gigs of photos before the iPod battery died.

Overall, if you are going somewhere that you can't bring your powerbook its a worthy investment. Its a lot cheaper than buying a couple gigabytes of flash memory (I only paid $82).

I don't mind the speed, but it will NOT import a large card of RAW images. I spent too much time with Belkins tech support trying to solve it (they finally said they can't test RAW images there, so they don't know if it's my reader or all readers, but I have to return it to Amazon for a refund), so I'm over 30 days now and Amazon won't take it back. I only shoot raw images, so I'm stuck with a turkey. For those who wonder, it WILL import all the images off a 512MB card, as long as they are JPEGs.

I bought this device to download pictures from the Memory Sticks used by my Sony digital camera when I am on vacation and away from my computer.

The device works as advertised. It takes me 3-4 minutes to download a full 128 MB Memory Stick. No, that isn't super fast but it wasn't a problem for me.

The biggest negative on this device for me was the fact that it can't read the new Memory Stick PRO media.

I bought this unit for use with my 3G 15GB iPod. While it did work to transfer my SmartMedia cards, there are some major caveats for potential buyers. #1 - the battery life of the Belkin unit is low, download three session of a day or two of pictures (200 - 1MB files) and the batteries are dead, #2 - the transfer times are painfully slow ... that 200 files transfer took 20 minutes and that's without a clear indication about the progress or status, except the flickering light, and worst of all #3 - the connecting cable was subject to being jostled and losing connection, which resulted in corrupted files on the iPod (not fatal). The only way, I could get the unit to work prperly was to place it on a rock-stready hostel table and leave it alone. When I used it on a BritRail train table, the transfer was disrupted by slight jostles. And once when I had to try and pack up the unit in the middle of a transfer (emergency Underground stop) trying to maintain the connection while holding it was impossible.