External PC Card Slot for Mac

[Brian Petersen]

I have a 12" Powerbook so it doesn't have a PC Card Slot like the 15" and 17"

Is there such a thing as an external PC Card Slot that could attach to my powerbook via USB or Firewire and then I can put the P2 card into that "reader"?

I tried searching for it but I keep getting pointed to adapters that do the opposite (pc card slot to USB). Also I don't know what specs to search for. I see type I typeII type III when their talking about what they can read and I don't know what would work and what wouldn't.

[Barry Green]

There are several USB readers for PCMCIA cards on the market. You'd want to make sure you got one that was 32-bit PC-Card compliant, and Type II.

[Jarred Land]

http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...pocket_udd.asp

I got an internal reader from them for very cheap, a SATA model that should whip the usb version good.. but they do have a USB 2.0 version that should work, and they have them with 1 slot or 4 slots.

[Brian Petersen]

Thanks guys.

Jarred, that addonics product looks great, but it doesn't say it supports Mac. Sadly, I'll have to keep looking.

[Edwin Hernandez]

I'm in the same situation as yours. I found them PC compatible, if they are MAC compatible is unknown for me too. Anyone?

I hope we had an APPLE version of Jan Crittenden in this forum to get the message to Apple about the P2 workflow and the importance of a P2 card reader via USB2 or FIREWIRE.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Originally Posted by Edwin Hernandez

I'm in the same situation as yours. I found them PC compatible, if they are MAC compatible is unknown for me too. Anyone?

I hope we had an APPLE version of Jan Crittenden in this forum to get the message to Apple about the P2 workflow and the importance of a P2 card reader via USB2 or FIREWIRE.

You guys don't want to just plug the camera into your Mac? It's not like we're dealing with tapes to capture and it's just a drag and drop operation and over USB2 the contents of a 4GB P2 card can be transferred in about a minute and 10 seconds. And about a minute and 25 seconds over Firewire.

...That is of course assuming your Mac is fast enough to write data to its HDDs at the full USB2 or Firewire (480Mbps or 400Mbps) transfer rates.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

There's also the "p2-Drive" from Panny. It's an internal or external unit that has 5 PC card slots. If you look at the defperception blog, there's a picture of it sitting on top of a Mac. I don't know what the pricing is on it, but I was going to ask Rush at EVS when I finalize my preorder in the next day or so.

[Brian Petersen]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kilgroe

You guys don't want to just plug the camera into your Mac?

That's fine for just transferring the footage over, but I'm talking about a workflow where I would be dumping one of the cards to a laptop while shooting on the other and hot swapping the P2s so I could continually shoot.

And the P2 Store is nice, but from what I remember it's rather expensive. I'm looking for a $30-$60 adapter.

[Edwin Hernandez]

Well said Brian. We want a P2 card reader as any laptop PC user has for continous recording. Don't we have the same right? Otherwise the PCMCIA compatibility of the P2 wouldn't be necessary at all (Macs or PCs).