I have a Canon DSLR, and I was thinking of getting a card reader, rather than connecting up to my camera each time. My laptop has a 4 pin firewire socket, so I thought a firewire reader might be a good idea. But, nearly every reader I look at requires a 6 pin connection (I know little about these things, but I understand the extra two pins supply power to the device).

Is my 4 pin socket a waste of space?

Having said all this, they don't seem much faster than, for instance, a USB Sandisk Extreme reader.

Would love any advice from anybody that knows more about these things than me.

Pete

The 4-pin Firewire connection is really "iLink" , Sony's attempt to take over the standard. I would guess you have a Sony laptop.

Enter: Firewire 4-pin 6-pin adapter into your search engine to find the adapter you need.

Having said all this, they don't seem much faster than, for instance, a USB Sandisk Extreme reader.

Firewire is faster than USB. Whether the device that uses Firewire can keep up with the communications protocol or not is another matter. What you are probably seeing is the bottleneck ("latency") caused by slow read/write times of the memory card.

Thanks for your help Bill, I've actually got a Toshiba Satellite P100-216, with Vista home premium. I have seen those adaptors, if I get one of those will it work exactly as if I had the 'pukka' socket in my laptop?

Thanks again

Pete