Card Reader or no Card Reader??

[kingsachin]

I have just celebrated the 6month anniversary (!) of owning a G3, just a wonderful camera.

I am happy with all aspects of the G3, and will soon be expanding the kit with a telphota adaptor etc.

I have just one problem, it seems to take an age to download and upload pic from and to the camera. Admittedly i have tried to manage a 100 or so images at one go, and am directly using the camera. But still, i am worried about the speed.

Two questions therefore, a) have others experienced 'problems' with uploading and downloading? particulary the speed of transfer

and b) should i go for a card reader?? if so any suggestions, Usb 1.1? Usb2.0, Firewire??? Are any of these options faster than directly connecting the G3 to the PC?

any guidance would be helpful.

[teflon]

the camera is usb1.1 which is pretty slow. If your computer supports usb2 or firewire, a reader of that type will be much faster.

[sidebp]

Agreed,

I have a Sandisk compactflash card reader and would never contemplate going back to downloading directly off the camera. The reader I have is:

http://www.sandisk.com/consumer/sng_usb2.asp[/url]

According to sandisk the USB2.0 devices are 40x quicker than USB1.1 - not bad for £18!

Regards.

[Andy_T]

Sidebp,

that's very interesting information!

Which software do you use to capture the pictures?

Regards,
Andy

[jglisson73]

I have had problems using the camera to load pictures back onto the card. If they are not the original files (if they have been edited in photoshop or something), the camera will not display them in the LCD. But worse than that, I took some edited pics in to print them out and the self serve machine would not recognize the files on my card :(

I'm hoping that using a card reader will remedy this.

[sidebp]

Hi Andythaler,

I generally just open the folder in windows explorer: the card reader becomes a drive.

Alternatively I simply open the images in photoshop by using the usual file...open routine.

However, it is worth noting that for safety (when dealing with important pictures) I normally simply copy and paste all the images into a folder on my hard drive.

[BruceW]

I have a card reader and rarely use it. If it is faster than the camera it probably isn't much faster, because I did not notice the difference.

What I have noticed though are the following, when you use the camera with Canon Zoombrowser:

a. It marks files in the camera as having been downloaded already.

b. It treats portrait files differently. ie. rotation.

c. File naming is different.

When using the card reader, the intrerface is just the Windows Explorer, hence not tailored to the application. Also, when disconnecting the card reader, you should check it is safe to do so, by checking a little icon in the bottom right corner of windows.

Bruce

[sprockett]

i use a usb2 card reader. WAY faster than camera..

i can do 50 megs in abt 15 secs...

[Lim.]

I bought PC card adapter ($19CND) almost immideatly after I found that I can not upload modified pictures back to card with G3 to bring ot to Black's for printing. And it even quicker than my harddrive.
Now I have 256Mb card in camera and I use Cannon software to dowload it on my laptop, but after I modified pictures I am uploadin it on smaller (came with G3) 32Mb card for developing.
Now I don't have to open card compartment on my camera at all.

[xuxu1]

I´ve been reading a lot of the postings concerning pro´s and con´s of card readers on this forum.

Finally i made up my mind a bought the Sandisk ImageMate 6 in 1 USB2.0 reader/writer yesterday.

Back home i started fooling around and testing it.

First i downloaded photos from a 512MB card. What a difference in speed :O compared to the download time from the camera (G5). Way faster.

Then i stuck the card back into the camera and made a format. Back into the card reader and recovered all of the files/photos with a digital image recovery program. Hence all photos recovered!

My next step was to upload a CRW (RAW-file) back to the card using the card reader/writer. Stuck the card back into the camera. No problem the uploaded pic is displayed on the LCD.

Don´t want to make this posting too long. Just want to let you know that i made several other experiments and all went well.

I would´nt want to miss my card reader/writer anymore! :)

Regards

[John_T]

Though I have a card reader, came with the card, I prefer to take the extra time to download from the camera where the card is safe and snug. More corruption and damage happens to cards through plugging/unplugging, mishandling, static electricity, etc. than anything else.

Of course if you have a number of smaller capacity cards, you have little choice. I prefer 1GB and up and more frequent downloading.

[xuxu1]

John_T wrote:
Though I have a card reader, came with the card, I prefer to take the extra time to download from the camera where the card is safe and snug. More corruption and damage happens to cards through plugging/unplugging, mishandling, static electricity, etc. than anything else.

Of course if you have a number of smaller capacity cards, you have little choice. I prefer 1GB and up and more frequent downloading.

Well as i mentioned before, i bought the card reader/writer for two main reasons:

1) way faster data transfer
2) reconstruction of data (if ever nessessary)

In my opinion i am on the safer side using more CF-cards (512MB in my case) than using only one big one and risking loss of data. I don´t like russian roulette if you understand what i mean :D

Kind Regards
Ed

[John_T]

Know what you mean. I'm not worried about it locally since I don't take more than 100 or less shots between downloads, but for the next trip I'm taking a 20GB Tripper, Image Tank or something.

[hownndog]

I am on my third digital cam.....trust me!!! from my experience....card reader is the way to go.....I keep it velcro'd on the top of monitor and take the card out of camera and insert: .. it shows as a seperate drive...i clik on that drive and it opens...simple stuff....I cannot imagine anyone going against it....you can transfer the images with the clik of "send to" as long as your drive is in the "send to" file....I usually find that it gets there automatically into the auto file....if not you can add it to the "send to" file easily.....why load all the software????