Vizo Mirrorbox 32-in-1 Card Reader

Introduction

When I recieved the Vizo Mirrorbox 32-in-1 card reader, I had no idea who VIZO was; even google had a hard time finding this little known company. However, “What’s in a name?” I thought, and progressed with my testing. Needless to say, I was very impressed, read on to find out why.

Specs

Essentially, the drive reads the following types of cards:

mirrorbox

It connects to your PC via USB v2.0 meaning that he should be blazingly quick. But it is backwards compatible with USB v1.1 so any PC can use it.

The Mirrorbox

The Mirrorbox has shiny black front and back, with the sides being chrome coloured. Each side shows up your fingerprints easily.

The front of the Mirrorbox has a small clip over one side, a small ‘Vizo’ logo, and a power/access light. This light changes from green (on) to flashing orange when its accesses any of the cards.

On the front side, there are 4 holes of varying sizes ready to accommodate any of the 32 cards that this reader was designed to accept. The first slot is for Compact Flash cards and Micro Drive cards, and this slot is the biggest on the whole reader. The next slot along is for Mini-Secure Digital cards, normal Secure Digital cards, T-Flash cards (needs an adapter), and finally RS-Multimedia cards.

The two lower slots are for, left; Smart Media cards, and the right; is for Memory Stick and Memory Stick Duo cards.

All the different card types are covered by different types of the same card type. For example; the Memory Stick slot covers MS-ROM, MS Duo, MS Select, MS Pro Duo, MS Pro Duo 2, and MS Magic Gate. So this one slot covers 6 different card types. You can easily see how this little box can take 32 different types of card.

Packaging

The packaging was a simple clamshell design with tape holding it together meaning that it was easy to open. Inside I found this:

There is a simple sheet of instructions telling you how to put the cards into their appropriate slot. Also, there is a cable that connects your PC to the Mirrorbox. Finally, there is the actual Mirrorbox.

Installation

Installation is pretty much like any other USB device; you just plug it in and Windows installs the correct drivers. I tried the Mirrorbox on several PC’s including ones that do not have USB 2.0. All of them worked perfectly.

Once the Mirrorbox is installed, 4 new drives appear in My Computer. This looks kind of stupid as you don’t know which drive corresponds to which slot on the Mirrorbox. It would have been nice if each drive had its own icon so that you know which drive that you need.

Testing

Testing was pretty simple, I used a Memory Stick, a Memory Stick Duo Pro and a Smart Media card. Each of them gave great transfer speeds and it was actually possible for me to access both the Memory Stick and the Smart Media at the same time.

You can remove any of the cards without having to go through the Safely Remove Hardware window. This is really useful when you want to swap cards often.

Conclusion

Looks good, and performs well. It also supports many of the major removable media standards that are used in today’s markets. With digital cameras and other devices requiring more storage, a card reader is becoming more and more necessary to quickly and easily get your data off them.