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

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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3,638
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
 
What cards are you using? They could be the limited factor. you wont really get any faster than a decent usb2 card reader.
 
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)
 
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?
 
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...?
 
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
 
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.
 
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).
 
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?
 
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 :)
 
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.
 
The firewire ones are faster, but concidering the cheapest I can see them is about £20 is it really worth it?
 
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