The Evil Eyebrow

New Equipment for Photography

Written by

Bill Ruhsam

in

Well, new equipment for managing my photography.

One of the downsides of buying this has been an increase in image size. Also, I’ve adopted the RAW + JPG method of doing my image capture. This means that instead of putting one 2-3 MB image on the memory card every time I hit the shutter release, I’m getting one 4-6 MB JPG and one ~20MB RAW file—a twelve-fold increase. This has led to some loooooong download times when I’m importing the imagery at home. Last night it took over 3.5 hours to get the images off the card. That’s a bit long.

I blame it on the card reader that’s attached to my computer, so I’ve replaced it with this:

New Card Reader

    I just tested it:

  • 250 MB with the old card reader: 6:41
  • 250 MB with the new card reader: 2:00 for the win.

Comments

5 responses to “New Equipment for Photography”

  1. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    Now you need a faster card. 😉

    Although 16+ Mbps is pretty good, you can go faster. I’m guessing that’s a Sandisk Extreme card from what I can see… you can go to a higher rating for a bit more speed. This also impacts the number of shots you can fire off before the memory buffer fills.

    Or you can save time by skipping the JPG for a 20% improvement. Converting takes only a few seconds… and you only have to store the extra space for the good shots.

  2. Bill Ruhsam Avatar
    Bill Ruhsam

    That card is an Extreme II. I checked out the III and IV for pricing but it’s a bit steep at the moment (especially because I need to replace my lens). I figure getting a three-fold increase in speed on the reader side of things will keep my happy for the time being.

    The RAW only idea is a good one, but the way my process works I don’t want to have any extra steps for basic perusal, plus every couple weeks I’m downloading images at my work computer and there wouldn’t be any facility for converting from RAW.

    Honestly, the best thing I could do right now, especially to get some more performance out of Idimager, would be to upgrade the computer. It’s 4.5 years old and showing its age.

  3. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    IDI runs quite a bit faster on K’s new I5-750 machine than it did on her 2.x P4 single core. I still have IDI V4, so I don’t know if V5 takes better advantage of multiple processors… which would help even more.

  4. Bill Ruhsam Avatar
    Bill Ruhsam

    If you find out, let me know. I’ll be contemplating a desktop upgrade in the next year or so. IDI is currently the most resource intensive thing I do.

  5. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    Looks like it has better multiprocessor support. See this thread:

    http://forum.idimager.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13597

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