I love card readers. I don’t think I’ve every plugged my camera into my computer to download the photos, I’ve always had a card reader. My first one came free with the compactflash memory card I bought and it was a pc card, that fit into the pc card slot on the side of my powerbook. Very cool. It’s much easier to pull the card out of my camera, put the camera safely in its bag, and then download the photos to my laptop.
I’ve graduated to a 15 in 1 USB 2.0 reader for a couple of reasons. My current macbook pro doesn’t have a pc card slot (it has the much smaller express card slot that isn’t large enough to take a compactflash card and I now have two kinds of cards I need to read. USB 2 is plenty fast and the reader is quite compact (similar to this one in my amazon store).
Even for people who have just a single kind of memory card, a multi-card reader could be a good buy. Why? Because those of us using a digital camera tend to be the photo people in our families. I like being able to download photos from everyone else’s cameras to make a quick slide show or burn a photo cd.
