Written by snapjag
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
Wow, the differences between the Firewire standards really have me up in arms. I’m a little disappointed with Apple for not making the Firewire 800 (1394b – 9pin) plug available on my MacBook. Because, it’s been out for a while, and the speed is amazing, up to 700 MB/sec. That’s up from the 100, 200, and 400 speeds of Firewire 400 (1394a).
I wanted to get the new Lexar Professional UDMA 300x speed Compact Flash card for my DSLR and I’m finding out a few things needed to make this all work.
First, my Nikon D70s doesn’t transfer at the 300x speed and not many new cameras do. The camera will still use the CF and at the highest rate the UDMA will allow for the cameras slot. That’s OK, I wanted to get the images downloaded off the card as fast as possible. So, I had to get all the components together that would allow the fast possible speed, yet be a complete high-speed set so when the time comes to upgrade the other devices, everything is at it’s peak.
The components required from photo shoot to post-processing are the following.
Camera to memory card to memory card reader to computer
Each of these have different transfer rates. The Camera (CF) being about 70x, the memory card reader (9 pin 1394b Firewire) is 300x, the computer (Apple Macbook 6 pin 1394a Firewire) is about 150x.
Because the Lexar camera reader has 9 pin 1394b Firewire connections and the Macbook has 6 pin 1394a Firewire connections. I am having to find an adapter that bridges this connection “disconnect”.
