Olympus Announces New USB SmartMedia Reader

MELVILLE, N.Y., June 17 -- Olympus America Inc., Digital & Imaging Systems Group, world leader in film and filmless photography, today announced the Olympus USB SmartMedia Reader/Writer, the fastest way to download images from any SmartMedia digital camera. The new device complements the Olympus line of connectivity options, which includes serial, parallel, and PCMCIA port image download capability, and floppy disk compatibility, making the Olympus product offerings broader than any other.

The Olympus USB Reader/Writer is travel-friendly and lightweight with an ergonomic palm-sized design (dimensions of 2-1/2" width x 4" height x 3/4" depth). No heavy A/C adapter or batteries are ever needed and there are no moving parts. The reader is hot swappable and Plug 'N Play ready, so it's always ready for instant use. It is ideal for portability and for those users that need to download image files to many different computers.

The Olympus USB SmartMedia Reader/Writer is also faster than any other desktop computer downloading solution. It reads at speeds of up to 1 MB/second and provides sustained writes of up to 400KB/second. These speeds are up to 100 times faster than that which could be expected when downloading through a serial port. With digital camera image-file sizes commonly increasing up to 5 megabytes, users need the fastest way possible to quickly and easily download those larger images to a PC.

The Olympus USB Reader/Writer works with industry standard 3.3 and 5-volt SmartMedia cards from any vendor. Images can be read from SmartMedia cards that were recorded in cameras from all SmartMedia based cameras from companies such as Agfa, Epson, Fuji, Minolta, Olympus, Toshiba, and others. Also of interest is a recent observation that SmartMedia cards have been implemented for use in other consumer electronic products, including the new Diamond Multimedia Systems Rio MP3 player.

The Olympus USB Reader/Writer will be available during July 1999 for .95. It is compatible with MacOS 8.1 or later and Windows 98 (USB port must be available). The package includes the USB Reader/Writer, drivers for both computing platforms, and manual. It can be purchased from camera specialty stores, computer superstores, office superstores, consumer electronic stores, mail order catalogs, and e-commerce sites.