Advice on which Firewire CF Reader

[pgayler]

I would be most grateful if anyone has any advice on which Firewire CF Card Reader i should get, to get the pictures off my Canon 300D, fast and reliably

[mr jones]

does it have to be firewire???

i bought a belkin usb2.0 CF reader for about £15 from jessops so you can probably pick them up cheaper on ebay. ive not had any problems (apart from when i installed it one of the sys files now wont allow windows to boot up with any usb2 devices plugged in, but thats not a problem as i dont tend to have it plugged in all the time anyway

[tomson]

i had a sandisk firewire reader (imagemate i think it was)and i wasn't impressed with it - was pretty slow. I swapped it for the USB2 version and it was far better. Really noticed a difference when copying over a full 1gb card of images.

[pgayler]

i presumed that a firewire reader would be faster than a usb2, form the comments it sounds like it isn't, so i guess i should look at getting a usb2 one.
How much faster will a usb2 reader be against downloading straight from the camera.

[mr jones]

i found it a bit quicker, plus the advantage of not having to have the camera on, so you can charge the batteries etc

[tomson]

Originally Posted by pgayler

i presumed that a firewire reader would be faster than a usb2.

So did I. I did think I might have had a duff firewire reader but then I read this: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...d-eraders.html and they had similar results. It was significantly faster than the no-name usb1 reader I was using previously but still was slower than I was expecting.

[dood]

usb2 card reader will be very much faster than straight from the camera.

[SeaneyC]

If you use a laptop, a 32bit cardbus reader will be even faster still than firewire OR usb2.0

[pgayler]

After reading the xbits article, i went for the Sandisk Imagemate USB 2.0, its most impressive, it took me 10 seconds to download 42 images all Large JPEGS, on average 2.5mb each, as opposed to 30 odd minutes.
Thanks for you help