what the fastest way to do this.....

Rooky007 · 14 Oct 2008 at 00:12

Ok Folks

What the fastest way to get pictures off a compact flash card to my Laptop... I got a bog standard USB card reader and it aint much faster than using my canon 40d.....

But be a quicker way as at the moment it pretty slow

olv · 14 Oct 2008 at 00:22

What cards are you using? They could be the limited factor. you wont really get any faster than a decent usb2 card reader.

Phate · 14 Oct 2008 at 00:27

Firewire card reader?

Rooky007 · 14 Oct 2008 at 09:05

I am using a Sandisk extreme III 4gb 30mb per sec compact flash card

Mr Jones · 14 Oct 2008 at 11:15

The card is fine, me thinks it's your USB port, are you using a USB2.0 port or 1.1? 2.0 is about as fast as it gets really (apart from firewire)

Rooky007 · 14 Oct 2008 at 12:16

My ports are USB 2 that what i cant understand... Could you refer me to a Card reader you think I should get? that if OCUK sell the one

Mr Jones · 14 Oct 2008 at 12:25

I just got a standard CF card reader off another online site for under a tenner. Sandisk brand. I'm just wondering if you're expecting too much from the card reader?

Or the 40D transfers just as fast as the card reader and you're expecting the card reader to surpass it?

Rooky007 · 14 Oct 2008 at 12:27

How fast should it transfer off my camera? I found it slower on the 40D then the 400D i use to have that what i cant understand.

Mr Jones · 14 Oct 2008 at 12:46

You are filling the card to the same amount of MB/GB or are you judging it from the number of photos? They are different in MP, so the size per photo is different...?

3dcandy · 14 Oct 2008 at 12:59

make sure the card reader is actually usb2 - makes a big difference!

JBuk · 14 Oct 2008 at 13:03

if you have a full sized Firewire port on you laptop you could get the Sandisk firewire CF reader

its like **** off a stick , much faster than my USB2 reader

rpstewart · 14 Oct 2008 at 14:34

USB2 readers are not created equal. I can get a far better data rate from the one on the side of my Dell 2405 compared to my bog standard Sandisk one.

EternityEight · 14 Oct 2008 at 19:09

How does firewire make that much difference? USB2.0s is miles past the read speed of the card, no?

rpstewart · 14 Oct 2008 at 19:14

Firewire was designed for high speed data transfers (from video cameras originally), USB wasn't. Despite USB2 being theoretically capable of 60MB/s (480mbps) in real life protocol overheads etc limit that to ~30MB/s, Firewire on the other hand can get a lot closer to it's design max of 400mbps (50MB/s).

EternityEight · 14 Oct 2008 at 19:25

fair play

olv · 14 Oct 2008 at 19:34

How slow is slow? can you time how long it takes to transfer a set amount of data and we can do some comparisons. you may just be expecting it to be quicker than is possible?

Ben643 · 14 Oct 2008 at 22:31

I've got the same camera and card so I'll try and do some tests with mine tomorrow and time how long it takes

Phate · 14 Oct 2008 at 22:47

EternityEight said:
How does firewire make that much difference? USB2.0s is miles past the read speed of the card, no?

Plus due to the fact lots of things use USB the bandwidth is normally taken up by something, Firewire has its own seperate circuits so it's much quicker

Ben643 · 24 Oct 2008 at 18:23

Ben643 said:
I've got the same camera and card so I'll try and do some tests with mine tomorrow and time how long it takes

I've just got round to testing the speed on mine...

315 JPG images at a total size of 1.33GB took 03 minutes 10 seconds.

I just connected the camera to my pc via USB.

balls · 25 Oct 2008 at 18:17

The firewire ones are faster, but concidering the cheapest I can see them is about £20 is it really worth it?