No Need for Backup Card Readers

When I go on a job or on vacation with my camera gear, I like to make sure that I’ve got quite a bit of redundancy. I carry two camera bodies, for example. If one goes south, I can still finish the gig. I don’t carry two of every lens, but if any one lens does fail me, I can make do with the rest in a pinch. There are some things, however, that I don’t duplicate. For example, I don’t carry two laptops. As long as I can get the images onto flash cards, the processing can usually wait long enough to sort out a plan B. As well, I don’t carry two card readers. I’ve always wondered if I should, but today I sorted out that I don’t have to.

What happened today? Quite simply, I left my FW800 cable behind in my hotel room for my card reader. I had the reader, but without a cable to hook it up with, it was effetively a brick. Useless. After asking around and determining that nobody else on staff at Web 2.0 Expo had the right cable, I thought for a few moments about going back to the hotel to fetch mine. Then, after really protesting the thought of walking back and forth, I remembered that I actually could get the images onto my laptop without a card reader. All I needed to do was hook up one of my D700s to my computer with a USB cable that I did happen to have and, voila! Back in business. It wasn’t as fast as using my FireWire-based card reader and not as convenient, but it certainly did the trick.

Yeah. It sounds kind of funny, but I’m so used to using external card readers over the last decade that I guess I kind of forgot that the functionality is built into every camera out there. Every camera body is, in effect, a backup card reader. That answers that particular question.