As I'm sure many of you know, PCMCIA cards have been retired and replaced by Express cards.
At the moment there is only one ExpressCard CF card adapter. It is made by Hagiwara and costs a whopping $70.00
http://www.hsc-us.com/consumer/card_adapter/EXPCF.html
But considering how much I loved my old PCMCIA CF card adapter so I decided to give it a try.
So it arrived today. It included instructions written completely in Japaneese. But it is very easy to use and if you need the instructions there is something wrong. You just insert the card and then insert the CF card and you are ready to start copying your pictures.
The card is nearly the same size as my old PCMCIA adapter with with Hagiwara card being about 2mm longer. A cool feature of the Hagiwara that the pins are covered by a sheath with which is lock in place untill a Card is inserted.
The reason given for replacing the old PCMCIA standard with the new ExpressCard was increased speed. On the two cards I tested (Sandisk Ultra II 512MB and 2GB) max copy speed was 9 MB / second with the Hagiwara card. It beats a 16bit PCMCIA by a factor of 10 and is a little less than twice the speed of the 32bit PCMCIA adapters so I would say that it succedes in this reguard.
Sounds good so far but there is a big draw back. The entire point of a Card Adapter rather than a USB or Fireware Reader is that the adapter takes up no space since you can leave the adapter in your laptop. Not gona happen. The card is too long. It sticks out of the computer by about 1 cm.
Overall, I have to say the card is a disapointment. It is fast, but it is too expensive and it is too big (does not sit flush with the computer). The speed could make up for either of these downsides but not both.
Fortunately both of these disapointments are more of design flaws rather than technical limitations. I can see no reason why the card would not fit, flush with the computer. Just removing the fancy pin sheeth whould have cut the obtrusion in half. I cant wait for more adapters to hit the market which should drive the price down and hopefully one of them will sit flush with the computer and I will be all happy.
