If you take more than a few snaps a month, you'll eventually end up buying a memory card reader. There are many advantages. First, even a junky dime store card reader will be make quicker transfers than hooking the camera up via a cable. Second, all the time your camera is talking to your computer it is switched on, and this drains batteries fast. Way faster than shooting actual pictures, in fact. Third, it's a lot easier to just plug the card into a reader.
If you have a netbook and a camera that shoots SD cards, it's even easier -- you just slide the card into the slot in the side of the computer. But for anyone else, or people using DSLRs with Compact Flash cards, a reader is the way to go. But are they all equal?
The short answer? No way. I have a cheap, no-brand unit I bought for less than €10 ($15). I also have a swanky Lexar "professional" reader that I paid over €50 ($70) for (although in the US you can get one for just $45). And guess which one is already broken?
The long answer:
I tested both readers with 500MB of RAW photos on the same SanDisk Ultra III SD card (4GB). I would have tried with CF, too, but one of the pins inside the cheap card has already broken. Both cards are USB 2.0 and were connected by a cable directly to the USB port on a MacBook. Transfer was drag and drop via the Finder to test transfer time without the image-processing overhead of Lightroom or Aperture. Here are the numbers.
- Lexar: 23 seconds
- No-Name: 27 seconds
I was surprised that they're so close. Scale this up, though, to the full four gigs, and you're looking over a half minute difference. Small, but significant for some professionals. Of course, those same pros would probably be using an even faster FireWire reader (assuming they have a computer with a FireWire port. Are you listening, Apple?) Remember too that if you are using SDHC cards, or UDMA Compact Flash, the cheap reader can't handle them.
So, read and write speeds aren't that much different. Is there really a reason to spend five times the price of the commodity reader? For me, yes. First, as I mentioned, the cheap-o unit is already broken. It lasted a few weeks before a pin bent. Thankfully it didn't damage the CF card (itself pretty expensive). The Lexar, on the other hand, is solid, closes down into its own case to protect the slots from dust and, most importantly, has proper guide-rails for locating a CF card, making it almost impossible to jam it in at an angle. It also comes with a two-year warranty.
The bottom line is that, while the performance differences are small, the build quality differs hugely. I expect to be using the Lexar reader for many years. If I stuck with the cheap, non-name readers, I'd be dropping $10 a month to replace them. Which of those sounds cheaper to you?
Product page [Lexar]
