A Lexar card reader, a worthwhile upgrade for a change!

I don't know about you, but often when I upgrade a piece of IT kit I have great expectations of improved performance in one way or another.  But more often than not I'm left feeling disappointed, particularly when it relates to my PC.  I've always thought it odd that hardware and software is bencharked to show us that something is faster because the difference is not that tangible, i.e. it doesn't feeling that much faster.

Well I'm pleased to say that a recent purchase is stunning in its performance.  Downloading images from a memory card can be a tedious business, yes I go and make a cup of tea too, but its still pretty painful.  I decided to buy a new card reader so that tipping 16gb of images into my PC would be faster.

My PC has USB 3.0 ports which are supposed to run a lot faster than USB 2.0 so I upgraded to a USB 3.0 card reader, and after a bit of research I made sure that it supported UDMA which is meant to allow fast transfers from the card.  I settled on a Lexar unit from Amazon which was at a good price.  I'd also seen many no name units on Ebay etc but decided to pay a bit more for a quality name.

The unit came with its own cable which is different to a USB 2.0 cable and I located the USB port on the back of my PC and plugged it in.  It was recognised instantly and added to the system with no problems.

Time to test.  I plugged an 8gb Sandisk Extreme Compact Flash card into my old car reader and transferred a folder containing 61 images (1.57GB's worth) to my desktop, the card is rated as 60MB/s.

Transfer speed of Sandisk Extreme Compact Flash card
on non UDMA USB 2.0 card reader.

The screen grab above shows the transfer speed and the estimated time the transfer will take, definitely time to go and make a cup of tea!

So then it was time to try the same card and file set in the new Lexar card reader.  The new reader has a couple of things in its favour, 1- its running on the faster USB 3.0 system, so the data can get from the card reader to the PC faster, and 2 - its a UDMA reader which means the data can be read from the card faster by the card reader than a non UDMA card reader.

Transfer speed of the Lexar Professional USB 3.0
Compact Flash and SD Card Reader.

As you can see from the screen grab above, the difference is staggering.  Transfer speed has gone from less than 3MB/s to over 40MB/s and transfer time from around 10 minutes to just over one.  Just doing rough maths, that means that a full 8GB card would transfer in just over an hour, whilst the new Lexar reader would do it in around 8 minutes or so.  

The new Lexar Compact Flash card reader shows a clear benefit and I feel is well worth the money.  I'm interested to find out why a 60MB/s card transfers at just over 40MB/s and will investigate since it'll be worth knowing whether a Sandisk Extreme Pro card rated at 90MB/s would still transfer at around 40MB/s or faster.  Not that I'd be buying the Pro card purely on download speed, in camera buffer to card speeds are a more important reason.

So this is a rare occasion where a new IT purchase hasn't left me slightly deflated!!

At Last Sharp Pictures!!

I've often felt that the pictures I've taken on my Canon 7D are not always as sharp as they could be.  Its been noticeable in a number of situations and I've put it down to operator error or wrong settings. 

Its been particlulary annoying when going out with others to do wildlife pictures.  Ok perhaps I can't expect to compete with a Canon 5DS Mk II and a 300mm f2.8 L lens, with my 7D and Sigma 120 - 400mm lens but I'm sure I should be able to get sharp(er) shots more of the time.  The Sigma lens is well regarded and I do get the odd sharp shot but not as often as I should.  In some images I can see that the Auto Focus (AF) point is spot on an animals eye for example but the eye is "soft".

One of the things that was bugging me was that certain shots with the subject close to the ground, showed sharp focus in the foreground going soft on the main subject.  After a bit of judicious Googling, I stumbled on a page from Northlight Images which exactly described my problem and how to fix it.

I'll not replicate here the work on the Northlight website, suffice to say that when I tested my camera/lens combination, the sharp point was indeed in front of the AF point.  Using the 7D's "Micro Adjustment" feature I was able to correct this in the "test" scenario.  I've had a quick go "in the field" and things did seem much much better though low light levels and high ISO's meant things were a little soft all the way through.

Hopefully I'll get out in good light in the next couple of days and see a great improvement.

Watch this space!