Product Description

The BlueProton USB 2.0 CF Card Reader/Writer is a high speed device that will enable you to quickly transfer photos and other digital files from any Compact Flash card.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12574 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: BlueProton
• Model: BPCFRWHT
• Dimensions: 4.00" h x .50" w x 2.00" l,

Features

• USB 2.0 High Speed Standard
• Supports CF I / CF II / CF ULTRA, EXTREME / MicroDrive
• USB powered
• Supports Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA
• Supports Mac OS 8.6 and higher

Customer Reviews

If it's free...maybe.
Picked this up free with the purchase of a SanDisk CF card, and I _may_ decide to use it. The pins feel incredibly cheap (several of them were already slightly bent out of the box) and the card doesn't seat all that well in its slot, so during my first test the card slipped a bit and it stalled midway through importing 10 photos into Aperture. No data lost, fortunately, but suffice it to say I have serious doubts about how the unit will hold up.

Also, in spite of advertising itself as usb 2.0 my Olympus E-420, a camera with only usb 1.0 connectivity, doesn't seem to upload pictures appreciably slower than this reader. I haven't done any scientific benchmarking or anything, but having now used both reader and camera with several different speeds of CF card, I'd say that both perform relatively quickly, and that when it comes to the time it takes to upload photos to my hard drive, card speed seems to matter more that input device.

Long story short, I would absolutely not exchange actual legal tender for this thing. As it was a freebie I will toss it in my camera bag for the rare occasions when I'm working with my laptop in the field and really need to save camera batteries, but other than that I think I'll rely on my trusty usb cable and Olympus E-420.

Watch out for shipping costs
If you buy this directly it cost $5.95 plus $3.99 shipping. If you get it for "free" with a CF card purchase, the shipping cost go to $7.95 - hardly free.

OK for the price.
I got this free with a promotion. It's nice looking and will fit nicely in my camera bag. It was free because I bought a 4 GB SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash card rated at 15 MB/s. I did some testing and found that it maxed out at 4.5 MB/s, regardless of which flash card I used.

Using a SanDisk CompactFlast to USB adaptor, the CD card I bought clocked in at 14 MB/s and an older card rated at 30 MB/s clocked in at 17 MB/s. So it appears that this adaptor is slow, but not USB-1 speed by any means.

Because I need a fast card in my camera but can wait for pictures to transfer to my PC, this is not that big a deal. Especially since it was free.

On the road, I'll use it with my netbook. At home, I'll use the SanDisk unit.