Having read recently a review of the 10D which mentioned that the CF card to
PC download rate was very slow and after having experienced waiting what
seemed an inordinately long time for recovery of my images from my fast
512MB card. I decided to run a quick test.

The CF card is a SanDisk Ultra 40x which by reckoning should give a
theoretical maximum write speed of 6MBps. I'm testing the read speed but
nevertheless the point here is that the CF card is in no way the bottleneck
in this test.

What I did was leave 20 images on the CF card, connected to the PC and timed
the download. I also checked the total size of the images so that I could
calculate the transfer rate. On it's own the results might not be very
useful. However I also own a IXUS400 which seemed to provide a faster
transfer rate. So in order to test this theory, I simply placed the same
card in the IXUS and ran the download again. These are the rather
interesting results:

SanDisk Ultra 512MB with 20 images with a total size of 37.9MB

Canon 10D:

Transfer Time - 2:22:9
Transfer Rate - 265KBps

IXUS 400:

Transfer Time - 1:19:1
Transfer Rate - 479KBps

So I think you can guess what I will be using my IXUS for in the future in
addition to skiing snaps. I guess the other simple solution is to buy a CF
card reader, which I would hope could outperform the IXUS transfer rate
also.

After this rant I do have a question; does anyone know if there is a
firmware upgrade available to help alleviate this problem? In all other
respects I'm wholly impressed with the 10D and wouldn't be without it.

Cheers,

Karl.

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