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Review: Apple’s USB 3 Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader offers only modest speed benefits, for now

Three years ago, Apple released the original Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader, a larger, faster, and more expensive version of a Camera Connection Kit component it had previously developed for Dock Connector iPads. When I tested it back in 2012, I noted that the reader was working 3 times faster than its predecessor when used with the then-current iPad (4th-Gen), and 50% faster with the original iPad mini. Since then, iPads have only gotten faster, while the Reader has stayed unchanged.

This week, Apple subtly replaced the accessory with the Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader (USB 3), which carries the same $29 price and arrives in a nearly identical box. As the parentheses suggest, the new Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader is capable of running at USB 3 speeds if the connected iPad supports USB 3 — for now, only the iPad Pro does — but it’s backward-compatible with earlier USB 2 iPads, and thanks to iOS 9.2, both old and new Readers now work with iPhones. If you have an iPad Pro, or plan to get a new Apple device in the future, the new version should be a no-brainer purchase over its predecessor, though other options (such as Eye-Fi’s excellent wireless SD cards, reviewed here) can eliminate the need for card readers altogether, even if they operate at slower speeds…

Key Details:

  • A slightly larger and, for now, slightly faster SD Card reader with a Lightning connector
  • Works with iPads and iPhones
  • iPad Pro transfer speeds are somewhat faster with new model
  • Earlier devices and iPhones will see very little difference, for now

Breaking with historic (but not universal) Apple practice, the USB 3 version of the Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader is — like the fourth-generation Apple TV — noticeably but not importantly larger than its predecessor when they’re placed next to each other. Measuring 5.2″ long by 1.2″ wide and 0.3″ thick (versus 4.6″ long by 1.2″ wide by 0.27″ thick), the new Reader has a longer and slightly thicker SD Card chassis, as well as a thicker cable leading to its Lightning connector, both parts no doubt in service of hidden USB 3 components inside.

Interestingly, the changes aren’t obvious from the packaging, so you’ll need to look carefully to make sure you get the right version. Apple’s new box looks virtually identical to the old one, this time oddly leaving off the SD Card icon that’s found on the top of both Readers, and indicating the new version’s presence only in tiny print on a bottom-edge sticker. The new version is labeled as “MJYT2AM/A Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader (USB 3),” model A1595. There’s no reference to iPad Pro or iPhone support on the box, or in the instruction manual. Even the image on the front of the box looks like the old version.

The user experience is mostly the same between the two accessories. Plug the card reader into your iPad or iPhone, and nothing happens. But insert an SD Card and the Photos app will launch automatically, switching to a newly-added Import tab. Press a button and the import process will start, blazing through even high-resolution photos at a rapid clip. To really test the “Pro” potential of the new USB 3 Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader, I decided to use a very large DSLR photo collection — 1,107 photos, each taken at a resolution roughly twice as high as Apple’s best still cameras, for a total of 6.83GB. I timed each transfer with the USB 3 Reader on three different devices, then after deleting and purging the photos, repeated the process with the USB 2 version.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the only device where I saw a meaningful speed difference was the iPad Pro, which took 6 minutes and 15 seconds with the USB 3 Reader versus 7 minutes flat with the USB 2 Reader. Running the same test with an iPad Air 2, the USB 2 version took a meaningless 5 seconds longer than the 12 minutes and 15 seconds of the USB 3 version. And the iPhone 6s Plus took only 1 second longer with USB 2 than the 6 minutes and 39 seconds required by the USB 3 Reader. My takeaway from these tests is that, for now, a given iOS device’s CPU performance has more of an impact on transfer time than USB performance; the real difference between the A9X-based iPad Pro and A8X-based iPad Air 2 was, as can be seen from the A9 iPhone’s speed, not USB 3. But as iPads get faster and add USB 3 support, the new Reader will likely continue to widen the gap over the prior one. If you routinely use large memory cards with lots of pictures, the minutes saved with the new Reader and iPad Pro will start to add up.

One other thing worth mentioning in light of the SD Card Camera Reader’s addition of iPhone support is the significant battery drain you can expect to see when using the accessory. On an iPad, you probably won’t even notice a drop in power unless you’re doing super huge photo dumps. But on the iPhone 6s Plus — with one of the largest phone batteries Apple has ever shipped — the battery dropped by 1% for each minute the SD Card Camera Reader was in use. The impact on smaller iPhone batteries is likely to be larger, and this is a key reason Apple previously declined to let these accessories work with its pocket devices.

 

So is the USB 3 Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader fantastic? That depends on the iPad or iPhone you plan to use it with. iPad Pro users should preferentially seek it out if they want to achieve peak transfer speeds, while everyone else can — for now — comfortably keep using the prior version, which performs almost identically at its sole task. I personally have strongly come to prefer the convenience of using wireless SD Cards including Eye-Fi’s excellent Mobi and Pro X2 series, which eliminate the need for Lightning readers in favor of automated Wi-Fi transfers as I snap photos. But if raw speed is what you need, the latest Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader is fairly priced at $29, and worth considering.

Manufacturer:
Apple
Price:
$29
Compatibility:
All Lightning iPads, iPhones

More From This Author

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Comments

  1. minieggseater - 8 years ago

    Can you export too ?

    • just-a-random-dude - 8 years ago

      Export to the “Reader” SD card? No, it’s sadly not possible, you have to export elsewhere to other apps or to cloud storage.

      • stevelawrence - 8 years ago

        Are there no apps that allow you to do this in the store?

      • frikova - 8 years ago

        Well, the *reader* SD card can erase pics. So I’d assume that it is technically possible to write on it. I know Apple doesn’t allow you to export to it, but maybe there’s a jailbreak solution for that?

  2. Scott Bryant - 8 years ago

    I want to know if this reader is UHS-II capable. If not, then the super-fast read/write speeds of the latest generation of SD cards will always be throttled. It’s not something meaningful to most folks, put if you are going to designate a product as “Pro,” then it should have professional capabilities and applications.

    • srgmac - 8 years ago

      You can bet it’s probably not, and I also agree — if you are going to use a “pro” moniker, then it should actually have pro features.

    • eastpointvet - 8 years ago

      Why would it matter if the reader is capable when its only a reader to import the photos into the iPad or iPhone? it doesn’t export your photos from the iPhone or iPad its only used to transfer what you have already taken with another device to the iOS device of choice. So the fact that the iPad is called Pro has nothing to do with importing pictures from a SD card device.

  3. MK (@MathiasMK84) - 8 years ago

    I hope Apple is gonna open up access to the card reader to applications like Lightroom including raw support in iOS X.

  4. modeyabsolom - 8 years ago

    The difference in transfer speeds between iPad Pro and iPad Air 2 with this card reader is no where near the vast speed difference between USB 2 and USB 3. With such a small gain in speed I now don’t see the point in Apple incorporating USB 3 with this generation of iPad Pro. I suppose it’s nice to have but its more USB 2.25 than 3 speed wise.

    • srgmac - 8 years ago

      They put USB 3 on the iPad Pro so it would be faster to transfer stuff to the iPad from a host PC. The bottleneck here, is the SD card itself. SD cards are slow by nature — there are fast ones, but they are expensive.

      • Scott Bryant - 8 years ago

        The bottleneck could be the reader if it’s not UHS-II capable. The latest SD cards are capable of up to 300 MB/s read speeds. I guess expensive is relative. I just bought a Lexar 32GB, 1000X (150 mb/s) card on sale for $18. If the iPad Pro is, indeed, going to be a tool for professionals, it doesn’t make sense to manufacture an obsolete card reader.

  5. Jason Cumming (@BK2K) - 8 years ago

    Are you on iOS 9.2? On my iPad Pro thumbnails for photos are much faster to load and imports for videos are at least twice as fast using the new reader and a Sandisk Extreme Pro Micro SD compared to the old one.

  6. Richard Graham Poster - 8 years ago

    are they going to disable this one like they disabled the last one i bought for my iPad 2? It just stopped being supported, leaving me unable to use sd cards with my iPad 2. For this reason I have given up on iPad for photo management

  7. Graham J - 8 years ago

    I think you’re missing something here. Only the iPad Pro has usb3 so that’s why it’s the only device that benefits from the new device. With any other device you’re comparing usb2 and usb2 so the speeds will naturally be similar.

    • Jeremy Horwitz - 8 years ago

      You mean the key point that was mentioned in the second paragraph. Right?

      • Graham J - 8 years ago

        No, I mean the paragraph where you mention all the tests and come to the conclusion that transfers are CPU bound. Having similar results between the two units on all devices except the iPad Pro suggests that USB speed is the limiting factor.

        On the iPad pro it’s probably sustained NAND write speeds that hold back the USB3 unit.

      • Graham J - 8 years ago

        Ok I read that paragraph a couple more times and see what you mean. The absolute times tell a different story than the differences. NAND limits all around I’d say.

  8. freediverx - 8 years ago

    I’m very skeptical of the Eye-Fi Mobie cards.

    I’ve read numerous complaints that these cards place a significant strain on your camera’s battery life, that they don’t live up to their Class 10 read/write speed rating (which slows down your burst shooting speeds), and that the gee-whiz benefit of doing wireless transfers does not compensate for molasses slow transfer speeds and sometimes finicky connections.

    I own a couple of Canon cameras with built-in WiFi yet I rarely use the feature because it’s much faster and easier to swap out an SD card then to fiddle around with the connection functions and wait for a slow file transfer, while denying my computer or mobile phone access to the internet via WiFi.)

    • Jeremy Horwitz - 8 years ago

      I’ve been using Eye-fi cards for years, and the Mobi series most recently. It comes as no shock to most photographers that adding a wi-fi transmitter to a DSLR will impact battery life, or that the cards (particularly older ones) aren’t rocket fast. Speed is, as noted, the key potential penalty you pay for using one. I have never found the connections to be finicky, either in an office setting or used in the field, and I’ve used them extensively in both settings.

      The convenience of having photos flow instantaneously from your camera, literally as they are shot, to your iPhone, iPad, or Mac is just fantastic. It’s not some “gee-whiz benefit” – that’s a trivialization of a key feature that millions of people use and love. Eye-fi has been an integral part of my personal and professional workflow, and given the choice between frequently pulling cards out for readers or using Eye-fi cards, there’s no contest.

      • freediverx - 8 years ago

        Sounds like you’re confirming that these things do kill your camera’s (and your smartphone’s) battery life and slow down continuous shooting because they don’t live up to their Class 10 rating.

        It’s not my place to tell you what solution works best for you, but I would argue that for some use cases the benefits won’t justify the drawbacks.

        It may be that you have a very specific use workflow for professional photo work where these things come in very handy. But I still sense that the more typical use case – a person on the go who needs to multitask while depending on both their camera and their smartphone – is ill served by a product that diminishes battery performance while essentially crippling many of your smartphone’s features while in use.

      • Jeremy Horwitz - 8 years ago

        Really not sure what point you’re still trying to make here. The review said clearly that the SD Card Reader is the solution to choose if speed is important to you. And as I said, Eye-Fi’s ability to wirelessly, immediately share images to an iPad or iPhone in the field has been a complete game-changer for my photography (as well as many other users’). Suggesting that it cripples ‘many’ smartphone features while in use is such a radical misstatement of reality that it’s obvious you’ve never used one. If anything, it enhances the phone’s ability to share incredible pictures, anywhere, under any conditions.

        It’s also obvious that ‘for some use cases’ one will be a better pick than the other. If you prefer to immediately receive each photo as it’s shot, Eye-Fi is great; if you like to transfer photos in big batches, and don’t mind pulling your card to do so, the SD Card Reader is better. Both options have impacts on battery performance, just as using your iPhone to record videos or transfer big batches of DSLR photos using the Reader will have a different impact than recording videos on a camcorder or sending over one photo at a time with Eye-Fi. What you call ‘ill served’ is really just based on your value judgment as to how people use cameras. And I honestly have no idea why you care so much to tell other people what will and won’t work for them.

      • PhilBoogie - 8 years ago

        I actually use both: larger SD card in slot one with RAWs and I put a Eye-Fi in slot 2, where the same photo goes to -but in .jpg- and I’ll have instant access to photos on a larger screen than the small one on the DSLR. At home, I plug the SD Card with RAWs into my MP and import…into Aperture (OSX Photos is waaaay too buggy)

  9. olsenconsulting - 8 years ago

    Great review! I am using a Ipad Pro, is there a way to preview the files on a SD card? I take a loot of pics/videos, and i would like to preview them before I decide to import them. Is that possible?

  10. PhilBoogie - 7 years ago

    Is the iPhone 7 / iPhone 7 Plus USB3 compliant? Or does it transfer photos from this SD Card Reader with USB2 speed?

  11. Sophie Lake - 7 years ago

    Hiya, great review! Just what I was after! :) I am going backpacking and need an easy way to transfer images over to my iPhone 5 for social media uploading, I am trying to decide between getting either the Lightning to SD card reader or an Eyefi 32GB SD card, I know you said you prefer using a wifi card but I have read such bad reviews about them. With the eyefi cards, is there an option to select the photos you want to import or does it automatically download ALL the photos on that memory card? Thanks!

    • PhilBoogie - 7 years ago

      My Eye-Fi card died some time ago, and I can’t say for sure, but believe you cannot selectively import. Once setup, the photos simply flow onto the iPhone.

      And if you’re backpacking it may be a better way for you to simply use this SD Card reader instead of Eye-Fi due to battery life. YMMV. Safe travels.