I shot a wedding yesterday, and it seemed like a good opportunity to test ingesting mechanisms. Not at the wedding, of course; I waited until I was in the privacy of my own home.
What I’m talking about is getting images from my flash cards to my computer. The verb of choice for this process now seems to be "ingest." The device in question is a card reader.
I have a USB SanDisk reader for my desktop, and it’s pretty fast. A 2gb card takes about 6 minutes to fully ingested into the machine (whereupon I will digest the files in Photoshop and excrete them to a printer or a DVD, where I trust the work will not look like, well, a bad metaphor.)
When I bought my laptop I got a reader that would fit into a PC card slot. I quickly realized that the transfer rate was far slower than USB. So when I would travel I’d pack the card reader from my desk and have one more thing to plug in. My camera store, Glazers, had a SanDisk PC card reader that I was told would be faster, so I got one; it wasn’t.
Somewhere I came across word of the Delkins 32 bit CF card reader and got one of those. It cost 4 times what my SanDisk cost (about $80), but it seemed a lot faster, and I’ve been using it exclusively for my laptop since. From this wedding I had a stack of full cards, so I put all my ingesting devices to the test. I measured the various readers on my laptop for the time required to ingest RAW images from a full 2gb SanDisk Extreme III card into Photo Mechanic.
The results:
- SanDisk USB card reader: 8:15 minutes
- Delkins 32 bit PCMCIA card reader: 8:30 minutes
- SanDisk PCMCIA card reader: 25 minutes
The Delkins is only marginally slower than USB, but much more convenient. Just don’t even think of using a 16 bit reader, unless you have a long novel to finish during the download.
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