Card reader Advice

[Guy]

Hi,

At the moment i download direct from the camera which can take a fair while. Is it faster to use a card reader and if so are there any particular makes to look at - seem to vary in value froM £2 - £30.

thanks for your help

Guy

[Pete W]

Card reader is a lot faster.... Be sure to get a usb2 or Firewire if you have that....

I have a Delkins Device one.... Personally I would get a reputable make...

[Roy]

In general, I would suggest you use a card reader rather than download from the camera.

Belkin and SanDisk (and of course, others) make decent readers at reasonable prices - look to pay between £10 - £30 depending on model.

Ensure you get a reader with USB2 support and attach it to a USB2 port - otherwise you will not get good transfer performance.

If you really want to be ahead of the pack and need to transfer serious volumes of data - see if you can find a USB3 device ... don't know if there are any on the market as yet.

Finally, it would probably make sense to buy a multi-format reader rather than a single-format one.

Edit: Posted in parallel with Pete W, hence duplication of USB2 comment. Firewire is also a valid option although less common on non-Apple machines.

[James Wheeler]

I have a recently acquired lexar firewire reader, before that I used a usb2 reader.

PC's do have firewire ports :) Just in my case, they were all the wrong sort! Had to buy a firewire PCI card for the pc for £12 off ebay :)

[colin]

My previous download regime was with an inbuilt card reader and it took around 70 minutes to deal with a full 8GB card ............. yawn!

On further investigation, the inbuilt card reader was USB 1, so I bought a Sandisc USB 2. As a test, I loaded a previous card that hadn't yet been formatted and the new USB 2 card reader dealt with it all in around 7 minutes, just enough time to brew a cuppa!

Colin

[Brian N]

I recently bought an 8GB Extreme III card from play.com (having found that 4GB doesn't seem to go anywhere these days) and bought the cheapest CF/multi-format reader they listed. About 6 quid, as I remember. USB2, as they all are these days, I think. Not really sure what the differences are as there is no real signal processing inside them - they just pass bytes from card to USB - but I suppose reliability might be an issue. No brand on the unit, just a "Made in China" stamp. Well, there's a surprise...

In any case, it beats my PC's built-in USB1 reader by a considerable margin!

[Guy]

Hi,

Thanks for all your advice I have placed an order for a sandisk reader.

Thanks

guy