memory cards and readers.......

[Daniel Browning]

what are good ones and why (compact flash)

I think it's just speed, capacity, and reliability. I would guess that the name brands are more reliable, but I don't know for sure if that's true. Lexar is my personal favorite, but I know others swear by Sandisk. Lots of shooters are happy with no-names, I've got a few and they've worked great. Capacity is an easy one to figure out, but speed is pretty nebulous. Thankfully, Rob Galbraith has an excellent site with lots of speed test data:



http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007


Unfortunately he hasn't tested the 7D. I would guess that the CF performance is at least as good as the 5D2.

-- i just bought a lexar firewire800 reader

Same one I have. I think it's great. What I love about them is that you can daisy-chain and stack them so that you're reading four cards at the same time! []

.i down loaded 1100 picts from a air show and it took close to a hour

That seems a little on the slow side. I use the exact same Lexar 8GB 300X cards (you have good taste! []), and I get at least 20 MB/s reads off them (I think closure to 30). If your pictures are 20 MB each, that should be less than 15 minutes.



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anyone have any ides or what you use that worrks good for speed..

One possibility may be the destination hard drive is too slow to keep up. Another way to check would be to plug into another computer and see if you get better speeds there.


Good luck figuring it out.