The Sports Photo Guy

With the PCMCIA CardBus interface fading fast, three new ExpressCard contenders are vying for fastest CompactFlash reader bragging rights. One of these three is the fastest CF reader I’ve ever tested; do you know which one to buy?

For the past few years, Delkin’s CardBus 32 adapters have ruled the roost when it came to downloading photos on to your laptop.  The UDMA version of the adapter, which I tested back in April, rivaled FireWire 800 readers under Windows Vista SP1.  As this adapter was phased out, Delkin introduced two replacements for it: a UDMA-enabled ExpressCard 54 adapter, and a “high speed” ExpressCard 34 adapter.  Both priced at $50, I was interested to see which of these two successors would take the crown for fastest laptop card reader.  Joining the mix is Verbatim’s $40 CameraMate ExpressCard 34.  Who comes out on top?

Surprisingly, Delkin’s two entries lag far behind not only the Verbatim reader, but the earlier, discontinued CardBus 32 UDMA reader.  While the new ExpressCard specification allows for cards to use either USB 2.0 or PCI-Express bus speeds, Delkin inexplicably opted for the slower USB 2.0 specification, limiting these card readers to–you guessed it–the ~25 MB/sec speed of UDMA CompactFlash readers.  In my battery of tests with 15 different UDMA CompactFlash cards, both of the Delkin adapters averaged 25 MB/sec, compared to the 32 MB/sec average speed of the CardBus 32 UDMA adapter.

The new champ is Verbatim, whose unassuming little card averaged nearly 35 MB/sec–the fastest of any reader I’ve yet tested under Windows Vista.  That’s because Verbatim’s designers wisely opted for the PCI-Express bus for transferring files.

Some additional notes: a few months ago, I bought an ExpressCard 34 adapter on eBay that was advertised as UDMA-capable and looked a lot like the Verbatim.  But it didn’t work (my computer would recognize it but the supplied drivers would not, rendering the adapter useless).  Caveat emptor.  In addition, while Delkin advertises markedly different transfer rates for their two cards (”up to” 33 MB/sec for the ExpressCard 54 and 20 MB/sec for the ExpressCard 34), both achieved nearly identical results that were clearly in UDMA territory.  I’m not sure if their engineers failed to tell their marketing department that the ExpressCard 34 was also UDMA-capable or if this was product evolution upgrade.