SD Card Transfer Rate

[Hi Ho]

I just bought myself a new Panasonic Lumix ZS3 digital camera. It was time for an upgrade from my old 2 MP digital camera that is simply past its prime. The biggest card I used with my old camera was a 1 GB SD card. At 2 MP, that was plenty.

With this new camera I purchased a 16 GB Patriot class 6 SD card from Newegg. The new camera records HD video so I was planning ahead. I only got the camera last night and have just been messing around. I am very impressed with the camera.

When it came time to transfer some of the pictures and videos that I took is when I became a bit annoyed. The first batch of pictures I transferred from the memory card to the PC using the card reader in my Canon printer copied very fast. 200 MB of pictures copied at 10+ MB/s. After that, however, it all slowed down.... way down. The next batch of files included video. They were small clips no larger than 175 MB. Transfer rates now are down to about 700 KB/s. Even when just transferring photos like I did the first time, it won't go over 800 KB/s. It takes a very long time to transfer video at this speed. It would take 6 hours to transfer a full card at this rate!

Would I be better off buying a dedicated card reader or is something else wrong here?

[glc]

I would install an internal card reader in your case - either a 3.5" or 5.25" connected to a USB motherboard header.

[Hi Ho]

Thanks for the reply. I just tried connecting the camera to the PC and using it as the card reader. It works great. I transferred at 16 MB/s and was even able to play the HD video straight from the card. I may invest in a card reader at some point but plugging in via USB works great for now. I don't get why the card reader in the printer is so slow. Maybe it's using USB 1.1?

[XenaWP]

The only disadvantage to plugging the camera in is using battery for the transfer operations.