Hey,

I don't know if this is new, but I came across it on the Lexar site:

http://store.lexar.com/?category=22&subcat...uctid=RW024-001

Does anyone have it? I would love to find something faster than the purple Lexar card reader I have and was curious if anyone knows of anything. I am also curious if stacking numerous card readers and off-loading multiple cards at once is quicker or actually ends up slowing down the process. Now that my assistant is off-loading 2 photographers' cards and I'm using some 4GB cards this process seems to take forever during the wedding day!

Thanks for any feedback

Sorry for the repetitive post. I'm trying to increase my number of posts as quickly as possible since it's been forever since I've been on here . Just kidding. So David, feel free to delete one if you see this. Sorry for being retarded .

It's new, so I doubt many people have it, yet. It looks great to me, because the one I have now takes the one Firewire port on my iBook. With the new one, I'd still have a port to use.

That was me, actually.

We use these in our studio daily/weekly. We have a stack of 6 and downloading is much faster and easier. Normally it would take 6 minutes for a 1=2gb via firewire. With the lexar stackables, we can download 4=4gb and 2=2gb in the same amount of time. Also great when your away from the studio.

There has been a little concern about data corruption using several card readers at once. That is, when downloading more than one card at the same time. This is more of an issue with the USB ones. Firewire was designed to do this so there shouldn't be a problem if you use more than one Firewire reader at a time.

Lexar recommends no more than four, as they're powered by the bus (you don't plug them in for electricity) and there may not be enough power for more than four. Obviously some people do (like Gene, above) and don't have any problems.

Since we've had them, we haven't had any issues at all. In the past we've used a SanDisk Firewire reader and a few USB readers. They all had issues at one time or another.

YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES!!!!!!!!!!!! i couldn't breathe without them. they are so freakin' awesome! if you don't have one buy four!

+1 They are one of the best things that I have purchased in a very long time! I use two of them stacked and they are so super fast. I don't worry about files missing because all I do is a quick check with what is on the card and what went to the harddrive folder and then I'm done! It has speed up my downloading times like crazy! You can't go wrong with them. Gosh, I almost sound like I should be getting paid by Lexar! ha ha! I wish I was...........

Hey Melissa,

I did a workshop with David Jay back in September and he was RAVING about these card readers!!! I can't wait to pick up a couple myself!

Brian

You guys are gonna cost me money.... I'm in the market for new reader(s) and I had myself convinced that these aren't worth the expense... but maybe they are....

Melissa! How funny that you posted this in 2005 and then Dane and I discovered them midway through '06 and thought we were geniouses! lol...

If this reader lives up to the hype . . . and, I'm sure it does . . . then, I'll be right with ya' in the same boat, Bill! I hear it smokes!!!

Hey, it's only money, right? Ha!

Lexar Firewire readers just rock in general. I decided I don't have the budget for a set of stackers right now so I got one of these on ebay for $30 and it downloads data from my 4 gb Extreme 3 card at 1.5 minutes per GB. Insanely fast compared to my old readers 4-5 minutes per GB, a big deal when you've got 20-25 GBs to download from a wedding (or 4 - 10 GB to download to work up a reception slideshow while wolfing down some buffet food!). ;-)

Yep! Same one I'm using! It ROCKS!!! That's what excites me about the stackables . . . imagine having what we currently have . . . x4!!!

That's it! B&H, here I come!!!

Yea! Sweet! ...and those Extreme cards download soooo fast! I have some older Lexar 80x and they take 5 1/2 minutes to download and when I put in a new Extreme card I was blown away at the read speed.

Awesome,
DJ

Ok, call me stupid - but I don't get how these work. Do they really stack on top of each other? Do they each have their own USB port cord? Thereby requiring their own USB port?

From what I've read, they daisy chain through each other when you stack them with one connection to the computer.

Also, they aren't USB, they are firewire which even though USB 2.0 has a listed speed higher then firewire actual throughput of firewire connections is way faster cause USB is a bus connection and constantly interrupts traffic on the bus to check if other peripherals are trying to send data.

Firewire was developed to pump video data as quick as possible. External firewire hard drives are like 5 times faster then external USB harddrives also.

I just bought one for $80 at Pictureline. I needed it to use the firewire port instead of USB 1.0 on my G4 laptop.

I have so many types of cf cards that I haven't learned the difference. Should I start buying Extremes? Isn't a certain speed good enough or is Extreme a certain technology that is even faster?

Lovecat JEn

Here's the deal with high speed cards. Most people won't benefit from a high speed card in-camera. The write speed of the cameras are usually slower than the cards are, but with high MP cameras (over 10MP) there can be a slight difference.

Where you'll see a speed jump is when you're downloading the cards into your computer. Hence the race for fast card readers and fast cards. This is especially true for those of us who show slideshows of the wedding at the reception. The faster you can get the cards into the computer, the faster you can get the slideshow up and running.

I get lots of questions from people (who aren't photographers) asking if they should get a fast card. I tell them to save their money unless they really have a need to download their pictures into their computers really, really fast. Most don't.

+1 on what Adam said.

Jen if you're buying a new card because you need/want to then maybe buy an Extreme 3 or 4 and see if it helps you at all in your workflow, but I wouldn't run out and drop a bunch of $$ on cards (or readers for that matter) unless you really need to speed up your downloading. (like if you just switched from JPG to RAW).

~Bill