Recommend me a card reader please.

Galaxy66

Galaxy66

Jeremy Beadle
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My name is Mal not Jeremy :)
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As I have always uploaded pics direct from the camera I know very little about card readers but after having a problem recently with my PC refusing to upload via the camera it would be a good idea to have a decent fast one at hand for CF and SD cards.
 
kman said:
thats what i got and very pleased. its damn quick especially with usb3 devices.
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Indeedie... And then price has dropped loads lately. I'm sure I paid £35 for my first one.
 
Cheers for the replies so far, that was about what I was expecting to pay:).
Would there be any connection incompatibility issues to any of my usb ports I need to be aware of, I have a fairly up to date custom PC I bought from Cyberpower about a year ago.
 
Galaxy66 said:
Cheers for the replies so far, that was about what I was expecting to pay:).
Would there be any connection incompatibility issues to any of my usb ports I need to be aware of, I have a fairly up to date custom PC I bought from Cyberpower about a year ago.
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No USB 3 is backward compatible if your pc only USB 2.0
 
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Just checked the spec and I have usb 2.0 ports.
 
Galaxy66 said:
Cheers Tom, is it any faster using a card reader as opposed to direct from the camera?
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In my experience, it's like day and night. Using my d3 and dumping 8-16 GB of photos into Lightroom with the camera connected took ages, have only done it once or twice for that reason. Using that card reader and usb3 or even usb 2 can get 8 gig onto my pc in what seems like seconds (okay might be a minute or so, but is super fast.

It's a worthy investment for sure.
 
I used one a while back when I bought my first digital camera but after forgetting to replace it in the camera and going out without a memory card one day :bonk: I have always just connected the body to the pc.

I have one on order now and look forward to experiencing a night and day difference in the upload speed....will just have to remember to make sure I do not go out with no card in the camera:D

Thanks for the advice.:)
 
Galaxy66 said:
I used one a while back when I bought my first digital camera but after forgetting to replace it in the camera and going out without a memory card one day :bonk: I have always just connected the body to the pc.

I have one on order now and look forward to experiencing a night and day difference in the upload speed....will just have to remember to make sure I do not go out with no card in the camera:D

Thanks for the advice.:)
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Enjoy. You have just prompted me to buy another one, to leave at work. Thanks! Lol. I hope you have a night and day experience. Please let me know either way as it will be interesting to hear. Easy way to solve leaving card out, is to get into the routine of always putting a card straight into the camera when you take one out, then you will always have one in :)
 
That's the reader I would have suggested Mal, I've been using one for a while now to get the images off my cards.

Set your camera to not shoot without the cf card..... and get into the habit of formatting the card in camera before your first frame is fired and you'll be ok

Always have a spare in your bag too ;)
 
digitalfailure said:
and get into the habit of formatting the card in camera before your first frame is fired and you'll be ok

Always have a spare in your bag too ;)
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There speaks a man who has gone out photographing without a card in the camera. Not that I would ever do such a thing................:whistling:
 
fracster said:
There speaks a man who has gone out photographing without a card in the camera. Not that I would ever do such a thing................:whistling:
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No me neither :lol:

I try now to get in the habit of putting a replacement card in the body, when I take the other one out to put in the reader
 
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i bought one for about £8 from Tesco just last week and am happy with it
 
Surely with the Lexar Pro the bottle neck is going to be the card?
My extreme cards do 60MB/s a second (on paper) so USB 3 is overkill, I know USB 2 is rated to 480mbs which (correct me if I'm wrong) is 60MB/s.

So unless you have or intend buying faster cards the a USB 2.0 reader will be fine.
Now i need to find out what the transfer speed of the USB on a D700 is so I can work out how much quicker a reader will be. Anyone have the answer?
 
fracster said:
There speaks a man who has gone out photographing without a card in the camera. Not that I would ever do such a thing................:whistling:
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Nah.... My OCD prevents me from leaving the house without the body being on my default settings and ready to rock. I know a couple of people who have turned up to an event with no ammo though :eek:
 
DpM said:
Surely with the Lexar Pro the bottle neck is going to be the card?
My extreme cards do 60MB/s a second (on paper) so USB 3 is overkill, I know USB 2 is rated to 480mbs which (correct me if I'm wrong) is 60MB/s.
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That may be correct in theory. In practice USB transfers tend to top out at around half that speed.

DpM said:
So unless you have or intend buying faster cards the a USB 2.0 reader will be fine.
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Most USB2 readers will not be able to take advantage of the UDMA capabilities of faster cards, thus restricting transfer speeds even more. So those cheap Tesco readers are almost certainly going to be transferring data at something closer to 20 MB/s.

My Lexar Expresscard reader reads my 60 MB/s Sandisk card at 84 MB/s. I'd guess that the USB3 reader would be about the same, but I don't have USB3. When plugged into a USB2 port it only manages 30 MB/s.
 
I got a USB internal card reader for the PC and a USB 3 PCI card and it's massively fast. I think the PCI card was about £15 and the card reader was about £20. It gives you lots of card options and 4 USB 3 sockets as well. I can download about 1GB of photos in about a minute and upload 13.5GB of data to a USB 3 flash drive in less than 10 minutes. Loads faster than my old USB 2 reader.
 
modchild said:
I got a USB internal card reader for the PC and a USB 3 PCI card and it's massively fast. I think the PCI card was about £15 and the card reader was about £20. It gives you lots of card options and 4 USB 3 sockets as well. I can download about 1GB of photos in about a minute
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I don't think I'd describe it as massively fast. 17 MB/s (1 GB per min) would be slow on USB2. My express card reader will download 1 GB in about 15 seconds.
 
Ah OK. Food for thought, thanks Hollis.
Good to be told the real world performance.
 
Card reader arrived today, a neat little thing it is, and it is indeed a lot faster than direct from the camera......now to retrain myself:D

Thanks again:)
 
Well hey frank, your card works out running at over 68MB per second and thats over 8MB a second fastrer than a SanDisk Extreme so you must have some damn fine cards. I've just done 1.62GB in 56 seconds which makes run at just a tad over 29MB a second. Which when I look at my card and it says its rated to 30MB per second I can live with that. Compare that to my old usb 2 card reader and SDHC card which did no more than about 8MB per second I'm very happy.
 
modchild said:
Well hey frank, your card works out running at over 68MB per second and thats over 8MB a second fastrer than a SanDisk Extreme so you must have some damn fine cards.
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Sandisk use the slower, but more relevant, write speed when rating their cards. So it's no surprise that the read speed is higher than the card rating.
 
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