Quote Originally Posted by JM Tran View Post
..... a 10 shot sequence on location took over 3 minutes to finish on the card, that was with one of the fastest SD cards around too. The stupid thing about the Pentax is that it has only USB2.0 for shooting tethered....
* The card transfer speed is an issue with the card type, not the camera itself.
if the card specs only allow for a slower(than CF card) transfer rate, then the camera really only need to comply with that rate of data exchange.. and not really any faster(although a faster camera transfer rate would be an advantage from a future proofing standpoint)
* To me this is perfectly understandable from an engineering standpoint.
ALSO!! You really need to take the amount of data available in each file into consideration as well! A 645D DNG file is over 60Meg large!! Even the jpg files it generates are nearly 20Meg, so this notion that it took over 3mins to transfer 10 images and that it seems to be slow(jpg shooting or raw?).. put that into perspective.. that's 600Megs of images being transferred via SD card transfer rate technology.

* While we know that a D3s or a 1DMk4 will always have an advantage in terms of transfer speeds, this is not only attributed to the camera alone. The use of SD card is the real culprit.
* Maybe Pentax should have used a CF and SD card slot format? Makes the most sense to me, as any professional currently using a large sensor DSLR and thinking of migrating to an even larger sensor format at a reasonable cost, woudl have many CF cards at their disposal. Pentax's reasoning is introverted and convoluted! They should have been also marketing themselves to the CaNikon pros as well!

* As far as I'm aware, there are no cameras with any port type that is significantly faster than USB2.
That is, I know of no camera, video nor still, that uses either eSATA or USB3 port types. And look at firewire and what happened to that! What joke that was.

* The Thunderbolt has to also be taken into context as well. While it sounds really uber chic and cool to read the specs and think of a better/brighter future, I'm sure the reality will be more like halve it and then halve it again for real world use.
The real way it works is:
Manufacturers keep adding needless and uneccessary pixels onto their camera's sensors at the design stage, with the end result that each image carries far more data than the previous generation technology did.
So by the time this Thunderbolt IO port becomes a reality, and mature enough to actually work at this half and half again transfer rate, a camera's image file is going to be upwards of 100Meg anyhow, thus offsetting the shorter time requirement in transferring to the PC, with more data being transferred.
If it takes 3mins to transfer a single 30Meg file at 1Gb/s, then transferring a 100Meg file at 3Gb/s will still take 3mins!

I'm afraid that your editor, MUA, hairstylist, designer and barista are all going to still require some level of patience for the files to transfer across to the PC.