Since Firewire 800 card readers are no longer sold by Sandisk or Lexar, even though many photographers still use FW800, it may be difficult to find a suitable speedy card reader. Apple’s painfully slow rollout of USB 3 also doesn’t help.
For photographers who need a FW800 card reader, there’s good news and bad news:
The good news is that there’s one company which still sells a FW800 card reader. The card reader, which is sold in Canada, is small, reasonably priced and, when in stock, delivered quickly by Canada Post.
The bad news is that the card reader works only with UDMA compact flash cards. However, it won’t work with first-generation UDMA cards such as the Sandisk Extreme III (30MB/s). So if a photographer uses older compact flash cards or other formats such as SD cards, it will still be necessary to carry another card reader.
Hey Warren, thanks for your always informative blog. Doesn’t all of Apple’s line of computers currently for sale have USB 3.0? We just got a MacBook Air and the USB 3.0 drive we got from Lexar is blazing fast.
Hi Carlin – Current Mac Pro computers (I just bought one) don’t have USB 3. No idea why not. Presumably, the new Mac Pro (later this year) will have USB 3. Also, *slightly* older MacBook Pro laptops (from the first half of 2012) don’t have USB 3.
Sure, my next computers will have USB 3 but that doesn’t help me now!