Joel Johnson, former glorious leader of Gizmodo, wrote an excellent column for them about the idiots who buy, and the idiots who write about, gadgets.
I didn't think I'd mention it here. But then a particularly egregious example of an unengaged-brain review slapped into my inbox.
ThinkComputers, you see, are very impressed with Brando Brando's 55-In-1 card reader. They gave it ten out of ten!
And why wouldn't they! It can handle fifty-five kinds of Flash memory card, after all!
The only teeny little cockroach in the banana split, here, is that there aren't 55 kinds of Flash memory card. Not even if you count old formats that almost nobody uses any more, and which this reader can't read, like PCMCIA and SmartMedia.
It's normal for card reader marketers to inflate product specs by pretending that it's remarkable that they don't just support CompactFlash cards from 1999, but also cards from 2006. Wow! That's two kinds of card, right there!
Yes, newer cards normally use some updated version of whatever the protocol is. But they're also backwards compatible with the old cards. They're the same darn thing as far as a reader is concerned. Motherboard manufacturers don't say you can use eleven kinds of hard drive just because the board supports every iteration of Parallel ATA, two flavours of SATA, and ATAPI. They tell you it's got PATA ports and SATA ports. Done.
Brando, however, have taken the number-inflation cheat to the extreme, dude. They've just listed every single name for every single revision of every single card format you can plug into their reader. They don't even mind putting down different names for the exact same thing, so they can count it twice. This is stupid, but it's even stupider to copy and paste that big indigestible list of formats into your review without at least pointing out how many real formats it's talking about.
So let's do that, shall we?
CF I
CF II
CF I WA
CF I ELITE PRO
CF PRO
CF PRO II
CF Ultra II
HS CF
CF Extreme
CF Extreme III
CF Extreme IV
IBM MD
Hitachi MD
MAGICSTOR
OK, that's all one kind of card. From a modern reader's point of view, there are only Type I and Type II CF cards; it doesn't matter whether they're one of those nifty-but-obsolete tiny hard drives or not (the last three on the list are moving-parts drives). And the only difference between I and II is that Type II cards are taller. Same pinout, same socket, not even worth calling them two cards.
So that's one out of 55, so far. Promising!
MS
MS MG
MS PRO
MS PRO EXTREME
MS PRO MG
MS DUO
MS DUO MG
MS PRO DUO
MS PRO DUO ULTRA
MS PRO DUO MG
MS PRO ULTRA II
MS ROM
MS MEMORY SELECT FUNCTION
MS DUO HS
MS PRO EXTREME III
MS PRO HS
MS PRO DUO MG HS
M2
I'll be generous and grant that the three different sizes of Memory Stick qualify as three kinds of card.
XD
XD H Type
XD M TYPE
OK, xD counts as another format. We're up to five in total now. Only 50 to go!
SD
SD PRO
SD ELITE PRO
SD ULTRA
SD ULTRA II
SD EXTREME
SD EXTEREME (sic) III
SD HS 150X
SDHC 2.0
MINI SD
T-Flash
Micro SD
Three sizes of SD, counting as three more formats. Total: Eight.
MMC
MMC 4.0
HS MMC
RS MMC
RS MMC 4.0
HS RS A15MMC
MMC MOBILE
MMC PLUS 200X
Oh, no - they're finishing weakly!
MultiMediaCard is just SD with no Digital Rights Management functions, so, at base, it only barely counts as a different card - though it is of course normal for card reader manufacturers to say that it does.
OK, I suppose it's fair enough to make clear to normal users that the reader can handle both SD and MMC. Let's raise the total to nine.
I'll once again be generous, and say that the Reduced Size (RS) version counts as another card type, even though (a) it's an orphan format and (b) it's got the exact same contacts on the front as standard MMC, so you stick it into the exact same slot on the reader.
So we're up to ten.
Once you winnow out the rest of the redundancies and separate entries for different revisions of the same thing, you're left with... nothing more. No old SmartMedia, no unpopular MMCmicro.
An unschooled consumer might assume that a 55-in-1 reader would have to be compatible with everything under the sun, but this is not correct. That's because this, to be generous, is a ten-in-one reader.
Which is pretty good going, seeing as it's only got five physical holes for you to put cards in.
Brando's product page links to some even lamer reviews, like this one and this one ("ever-changing memory paradigms", eh?). (This one's OK, though.)
Brando's store wants $US28 plus $US3 shipping for the "55 in 1" reader.
USB Geek, about whom I'm feeling guilty because they sent me some widgets to review about a million years ago and I haven't done it yet, have a slightly less flagrantly mispromoted reader for $US15, delivered.
If you can find something the Brando reader reads that the USB Geek one doesn't, and you care, then go on and pay twice as much for the 29736-In-1 Brando product.
Otherwise, though, please don't encourage them.
15 February 2007 at 7:16 pm
I wonder why these things are called "readers" when I have never yet seen one that will allow you to prevent the system writing to the card if it wishes to. A true "Reader" would be really handy in my retail environment to ensure I can't modify a customers card by accident.
I once sold a reader called "All-in-1" which seems a bit of a lazy choice, but sure hard to top. A shame it was far from capable of taking every card type available. This craziness just makes it more confusing than needs be for consumers.
15 February 2007 at 10:31 pm
A true "Reader" would be really handy in my retail environment
Behold: A registry tweak that'll let you do exactly that!
15 February 2007 at 10:52 pm
And here I thought hard drive manufacturer capacity figures were bad. That's like nothing compared to this.
It's one thing to list on the packaging all the names for all the supported formats. Arguably, that makes it easy for consumers to verify it supports the format(s) they need, without knowing synonyms or industry jargon. (You *could* structure the list so that each real format gets a single bullet point with a comma-separated list of names, which would be more clear, but perhaps that's being picky about presentation. Perhaps.) Counting up all those names, however, and saying that it supports that many formats, is... another thing.
15 February 2007 at 11:59 pm
Surely the SDHC cards deserve to be counted separately given that SDHC cards don't work in SD devices?
16 February 2007 at 12:33 am
I suppose. OK, maybe it counts as an 11-in-one reader, then.
(Seeing as no devices yet use SDHC cards as far as I know, though, I would not be surprised to discover that this reader can't actually read them anyway. :-)
16 February 2007 at 10:39 am
Well I hope the 2 usb SDHC card readers I just ordered from USB Geek (thanks to your link) work with the $100 8GB SDHC card I just received (all praise the mighty ebay)!!
16 February 2007 at 7:25 pm
Thanks for the registry hack, I wish it was for Win 2K also.
Quite a few of the latest digital cameras are supporting SDHC, and there are a few firmware updates for DSLRs using SD (Pentax especially) to support SDHC.
Also not all readers support xD(M) and xD(H), and if these cards are used in such a reader you can kiss your precious data goodbye. This is really nice as most readers don't even indicate if they DO support them.