any new p2 readers available via firewire or USB?

J

jaan

New member
i haven't been around the forum for a while and i did a bunch of searching, but i apologize if it's already been answered...

i have an old 12-inch powerbook (1.33 ghz g4) and the only ports it has are firewire400, usb and ethernet.

during my last shoot i imported via firewire, using the camera to read the cards... which was less than ideal (like shooting film with only one mag). and i'm not interested in the firestore. are there any new options for reading a p2 card and importing via firewire or usb? or is a cheap laptop with a PCMCIA card reader still the most inexpensive option?

thanks in advance, and sorry if this has already been answered a gajillion times in the last week.

- jaan
 
There will likely never be a cheap USB or firewire card reader. Such a product would have to be designed specifically for the P2 cards, and that just isn't likely to happen.

The cheapest option is the PC laptop at $300-$400.

The other options that would work for your situation are the P2 Store, or the PCD20 5-slot reader, but each of those is ~$1800 or so.
 
That will not work, and none of those types of devices will ever work.

Again, it would have to be specifically designed for "P2" media. If it isn't, it will not work. If it was designed for P2, they'd clearly advertise it.

So I guess the answer is: if you have to ask, then no it will not work.
 
I definetly do not want to start an arguement but I just would like to understand better the topic at hand. If the reader has to be built specificaly for the P2 card how are all older laptops working. I mean my laptop came out long before the HVX200 ever hit production. There must be certain specification that meet the requireement. It also kinda worries me because if I want the life of my camera to last I have to make sure my laptop stays running and its alread 4 years old. $1800 for a P2 store will work but thats a lot of money for a PCMCIA Cardbus. PCMICA has been out since 1991, its not exactly a new technology and is already being replaced.

When you mount the P2 card in your laptop what happens? Does it mount as an storage device? If it does there must be a standard to the PCMICA cardbus that has to be met becuase if all laptops meat the requirement there must be another solution. Besides if Panasonic came out with a cheap usb reader they coupld make a killing. (I wish i could try it. I have had my HVX200 for over 2 weeks and I am still waiting for P2 cards :-(. I have no way of testing or learning about it)

I'll conclude with Barry surely knows a lot. You don't have to look far to see that. Hopefully he can shed some more light on the subject. I guess i'm just acting like a little kid that keeps asking "but why" until I find out the absolute answer.

Tom
 
Older laptops with PCMCIA/PCCard slots are actually a simpler solution than new ones with ExpressCard slots -- the latter physically cannot accomodate P2 cards. You can get an adapter from Duel Systems, but then you sacrifice some of the convenience and compactness of a laptop.

If you have a PCMCIA/PCCard slot, all you need to do is install the P2 drivers from Panasonic. After doing that, P2 cards mount as standard removeable mass storage devices -- they are assigned a drive letter and can be read from, written to, and formatted using Windows.

BTW, Panasonic does have a device that lets you ingest P2 cards through a USB connection, the AG-HPG10 "P2 Gear". The price (US$ 3995) is a bit steep if that is all you will use it for.
 
Why won't the 32bit usb cardbus adapters work? I mean after you install the P2 Panasonic driver and the Cardbus driver is your computer be able to tell if its a USB or a Internal PCMCIA slot? I guess in my case and I am sure with many of you, we really don't have $3000 to buy Panasonics usb adapter. Personaly I think its a rip but people buy them. I just don't understand why the usb and other 3rd party cardbus solution can't work, and what the deciding factor is.
 
yeah, i dont see why any old usb,fw,pci based external pcmcia reader wouldnt work? i mean thats all your pcmcia slot on your laptop is???
 
A PC laptop is a PCMCIA hardware device, and the driver that Panasonic supplies handles communicating with the P2 card directly. So that works. And a PCI->PCMCIA card would also work.

But these external adapters are USB devices, not PCMCIA devices. There's a level of translation that goes on. P2 to USB doesn't happen easily or cheaply. That's why the P2 Store and the PCD20 are so expensive -- they actually have their own computers in there that handle the translation from the PCMCIA bus to speak to the card, and then translate that into USB commands that can be fed as a remote USB device.

No cheap reader is going to have that hardware in place. Therefore, no cheap reader that's not specifically designed to work with P2, is going to work. And if the reader you're looking at *was* designed to work with P2, it'd loudly trumpet it on the side.

I spoke with a hardware engineering company about this last year, because I was considering a lot of options -- including commissioning the company to develop exactly what everyone wishes there was, which is a cheap USB->P2 or FW->P2 adapter. I was told that it's not possible. The potential sales volume is way too low to support the fabricating, programming, and manufacturing of the necessary hardware.

If someone wants to prove me wrong, we'd all be thrilled to get a cheap option. But as I've explored it so far, I've come to the conclusion that it just isn't possible and it isn't gonna happen.
 
Along with "has anyone tried upgrading a 4GB P2 card to 16GB using cheap SD cards from Walmart"...
 
It's kinda of funny that CompUSA was selling ACER and Compaq laptops in the $350.00 range with pc cardbus type II slots last weekend, and yet it cost prohibitive to make a standard reader.
 
That's because ACER will probably sell ten million of those, vs. maybe 20,000 people in the market for a cheap card reader. It's all about the economies of scale.
 
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