By Paul McCollum
Anyone who has kept up with the megapixel boom in digital cameras knows the frustrating drawback of higher and higher resolution images: file size. Any recent DSLR camera is churning out images up to and over 10MB per picture and that’s ignoring video files. Filling up a 16GB memory card, which is almost the standard these days, wouldn’t take more than a few shooting sessions. Finally getting around to removing said pictures from their digital film canister could take hours. Flash memory has been bumped in speed a bit to be able to store high definition video and images but USB 2.0 card readers max out pretty quickly.
Lexar, a friend to digital photographers, has a new card reader that takes the leap to USB 3.0. Besides being fast, it has a compact and dust proof design that should make it easy to carry with your digital cameras. Newer, faster memory and this spry little reader gives you a fighting chance that you’ll be able to get all your one year old’s birthday pictures off your camera before he hits the terrible two’s. The jump from 40MB/s to 500MB/s sounds great but how does it actually fare when dealing with your average memory card. Performance, transfer rates and time are tested and graphed in a review posted at Everything USB.
