By Chris Chang, posted Mar 23, 2011 at 2:20 PM, 46,778 views,

The Must-Have iPad Accessories For Photographers (video review)

The iPad 2 is here, and the original iPad is now $100 cheaper. They could have been the photographers best friend but, the lack of integrated card reader & USB somehow affect a photographer’s workflow. Apple provides a Camera Connection Kit for them, it works great with two dongles — Camera Connector & SD Card Reader, but for professional photographers who are using a Canon 5D Mark II or Nikon D3s, they need a CF card reader. So, here we have the world’s first CF card reader for iPad & iPad 2. Video review after the break. Oh, we found out that the 3-in-1 Camera Connection Kit supports iPad 2!

CF card? That’s for professional photographers. With the CF card reader for iPad, you can preview your high res photos on iPad’s large screen, or back up photos while in the field. Cracking open a laptop/netbook may be a solution, but that’s not cool. For many photographers, the iPad can serve as a beautiful backup device. When you take a break from shooting, just transfer the images from your memory card to the iPad. Now your photos live in two places.

It is small, features CF card slot and a USB interface.

How to use? Just plug it into the dock connector port on your iPad. It works perfectly on our iPad 2 with iOS 4.3. For the USB port, connected devices that require power of more than 20mA will not work with it. And for the CF card slot, it is compatible with all UDMA and non-UDMA CF cards, supports read/write speeds up to 133MB/s. Awesome.

We tested it with a Sandisk Ultra 4GB CF card (30MB/s), and the card contains three photos (21 megapixels, JPEG, total: 13.6MB) and five videos (1080/24p, total: 590MB), all taken with Canon 5D Mark II.

Transfer speed is perfect, and it takes a little time for us to transfer the 1080p footages. Thumbnail images for the video files are displaying correctly, so we could take a peek on the videos before we decide to import the files to the iPad.

After importing the photos and videos, there’s only one thing disappointed us and that was the imported videos. The iPad does not support 5D Mark II footages, so we could not watch them on the large screen. This is pretty bad for film-makers who wish to preview their footages on the iPad after filming. Crap. Anyway, everything is working, no issues of corrupted photos after the transfer, and it works with RAW files. It comes in black only and is available for sale for $29.90 from the M.I.C. store.

Next, the 3-in-1 Camera Connection Kit.

We introduced it last year December and it is great stuff, which crams accommodations for USB, SD and Micro SD cards in one tiny (but unofficial) dock-connecting package. We tested it on the original iPad, and today, we found out that it works on iPad 2, flawlessly. Video below.

It fully supports iOS 4.3, so owners of the original iPad do not have to worry about the support for the latest firmware. It comes in both black and white and is available for sale for $29.90 from the M.I.C. store.

Hope you guys like these stuff! ^O^

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TAGS: Culture:China, iPad, iPad 2, photographers, photos, SD card, videos