TechniTip.Net

Firewire CF Card Reader with Notebook?

The bigger CF cards and mega pixels of digital photo cameras get, the more you want to have the pictures copied to your notebook/desktop, for sure. After I got my Canon 5D MKII with 21 mega-pixels I really want to have the speed increased it takes to copy pictures to my notebook. With my very old card reader it takes about half an our to copy. Ok, firewire sounds really fast and my notebook has a firewire port, so I decided to get a firewire CF card reader…

So I went to a local photo store and purchased a Hama firewire CF card reader. Back at home I recognized that the firewire cable doesn’t fit into the firewire port of my Dell Latitude notebook. Went to a PC cable store and got a cable from firewire 400 to firewire 800. Fine, everything fits now put Windows 7 did not detect anything on the firewire port.

After searching the Internet I found out that firewire CF card readers need at least 6-pin firewire ports because they need the power supply from the firewire port. If you have a 4 pin port – like me – you can not use firewire CF card readers. Unfortunately I did not get this information from my friendly photo store…

Furthermore firewire doesn’t make sense until you have firewire 800. Theoretically there is no speed between firewire 400 and USB2.0.

As a result I’ll by a new USB2.0 CF card reader for my notebook.

Further information

4 pin firewire compact flash card reader?

Firewire CF Card Reader