I'm just about to pick up my Nikon CP950. After I get my NiMH batteries and charger, plus the CompactFlash memory I've ordered, I'm pretty quickly going to want to transfer images to my desktop PC (running NT). My question is, does anyone have a simple cost/benefit tradeoff chart for the various transfer technologies? I'm looking for a simple matrix:

Technology Cost Speed Serial ??? 115KBPS USB ??? ??? SCSI Card Reader ??? ??? Others Technologies???

Thanks,

//Thomas Thomas K. Burkholder

-- Thomas K. Burkholder (tburkhol@us.oracle.com), May 07, 1999

Answers

Oh man, this discussion forum software whacks your whitespace, unless you make two carriage-returns... that sux. So the original matrix was supposed to have three columns, first column Technology listing Serial, USB, and SCSI card reader, and possibly others, second column lists the cost of each, third column Speed (I only know that serial is 115 KBPS).

Not looking for exact numbers here but some sample numbers that will let me (and anyone else who might have this question in the future) know what they're getting into.

Thanks again.

//Thomas

-- Thomas K. Burkholder (tburkhol@us.oracle.com), May 07, 1999.

Well, no simple charts for now, but I can give you some advice. Try www.cnet.com. Select "Shopping" then go to the "Camera" category and select "Camera Accessories." You'll find a group of accessory items. You can also try searching for "lexar media reader" on the Cnet page after you select the "Shopping" category.

The USB units may be a bit faster, but the parallel port models are nearly as quick and are more compatible, since you need a later version of Win 95 or Win 98 to use USB. I have a Lexar parallel port based smartmedia reader that transfers and writes 8MB of images to hard disk in about 15 seconds flat on either my 133mhz laptop or my 266mhz "slightly" overclocked tower system. That's about 550Kbytes/Sec vs. about 11.5Kbytes/Sec for 115Kbaud serial links. The speed of the parallel port units will vary based on the speed of the parallel port and the method of transfer you have your port configured to support. USB should be good up to around 900Kbytes/Sec practically, with an unattainable theoretical max. of 1200Kbytes/Sec. So, if you have working USB on your machine it supposedly has an edge over the parallel port based units, but it's not going to cost you more than a few seconds either way. Pricing varies so much that I won't even get into it, but I have seen the Lexar readers mentioned above drop from over $65 to under $40 in the last few months.

Two other alternatives are the Flashpath adaptors that let you insert the camera memory and then put the whole unit into a standard 3.5" floppy drive, or pcmcia adaptors. I'm afraid you'll have to do some searching for those, but using the above descriptions on the cnet page as search keywords could go a long way towards uncovering what you want.

There may soon be a Faq or article coming to the Imaging Resource discussing this topic in greater depth. :-) Good Luck.

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), May 07, 1999.