| Product: FlashPath Adapter |
Company: Olympus |
| Web: www.olympus.com |
Phone: 800-645-8130 |
| Platform: Mac and PC |
SRP: US$50
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award:
Road Kill |
Recently I found myself in a bit of a pickle. My old digital camera was incompatible with my new PC because my camera needed a serial port and my "legacy-free" PC only has USB. No serial-to-USB adapter seemed to work, so I had to find another way of getting my pics into my PC. The option that seemed the most flexible was the FlashPath SmartMedia adapter from Olympus.
The FlashPath SmartMedia adapter is an ingenious device (on paper, at least). It's the same size and shape as a floppy disk, but has a slot in the side to accept a SmartMedia card. Take a SmartMedia card from a digital camera, stick it in the FlashPath, put the FlashPath in a standard floppy drive, and all the photos can be accessed and transferred. Although the version I tried was made by Olympus, it's actually a re-branded product from SmartDisk.
The advantage of the FlashPath is that you can do away with a cable and reduce battery drain on your camera while you're transferring photos. Primarily useful for transferring pics from digicam to PC, it can also be used for other sorts of data storage or transfer. That means you can transfer large files from office to home without having to create a split .zip file or cart around Zip discs. It can also be used to transfer files from PC to other handheld devices (other versions work with Sony's Memory Stick, and Multimedia Card/Secure Digital formats).
That all seemed perfect for me because of my incompatibility issues, and because I often need to transfer large files to my office computer and didn't feel like uploading them to the Net and downloading them at home. Solve all my problems with just one piece of tech!? Not so fast.
The package contains four regular floppy disks and the FlashPath disk. Each of the floppies contains the install software for different versions of Windows and Mac. That means that in order to make the FlashPath a truly portable data storage device, you need to carry around at least two or three disks, just to make sure that whichever PC you encounter, you'll be able to configure it to read your FlashPath disk.
Maybe my expectations were too high, but this is how I expected the device to work: put it in a floppy drive, hit the "shortcut to floppy drive a:" icon, and instantly see a list of all the files on the SmartMedia card. Drag and drop, pop and go. That was the fantasy.
The reality is much different. Once the software was installed, I noticed a problem right away: a little black disk icon in my system tray. I hate software that installs in the tray! While this was merely an irritation at first, it became an annoyance when I rebooted my computer -- the software launched and tried to look for the FlashPath (even though the directions explicitly state that the disk should not be inserted at start up). Of course, when it looked for the it and didn't find it, I got an error message. I promptly eliminated the software from my start up file and system tray.
Then I tried to access my photos from the SmartMedia card. I finally got my PC to recognize the card by rebooting and ignoring the "drive not ready" errors a few times, and finally got my pictures off the card. With that success under my belt, I thought I'd try transferring other files. No such luck. Every time I tried to transfer a file to the FlashPath, my computer would crash. Sometimes it would transfer most of a file, sometimes none of it, but it would always crash. When I installed the software on another PC, trying to transfer the file from the card to the PC, it had the same effect, crashing every time. When I called Olympus tech support about it, the rep literally laughed at my problem: "We don't support that feature." "But it says right on the box that it can be used for transferring large files between computers," I replied. "Well, don't believe everything you read" is what I heard in response, though I think it might just have been the tone in his voice when he said "Thank you for calling Olympus."
At every stage, the software seemed buggy and unreliable. Transfers to and from the card were unacceptably slow and the only benefit the card provided was getting my TECHXNY pictures from my camera so I could file my Street Tech expo report. Ultimately, the card went back to the shop from whence it came, and I was able to get a full refund. I'm sure if "Chuckles" the tech support weenie would've been behind the counter at Staples he would have gloated an "I told you so."
- Nate Heasley [8/13/01]
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