Review: Apple iPad Camera Connector Kit

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

One of the biggest criticisms about the Apple iPad was the lack of a built-in SD Card reader or USB connector for file transfer on-the-go. Well, for $35.00, you can get the iPad Camera Connector Kit that has both USB and SD functionality and can be used to grab photos directly from cameras as well as connect external USB keyboards and even audio devices. Its not the most elegant solution but it works.

When the iPad was announced early this year one of the best uses we envisioned for the device was as a portable photo viewer and storage solution. Photographers on the go could quickly offload photos from their cameras, view the pictures on a large screen and even use the iPad to email or upload them to an online server. 

While most point-and-shoot and DSLR cameras now use some form of SD Card more some of the older cameras and the higher end shooters use CompactFlash cards, MemoryStick Pro or other, more arcane forms of memory. The non-SD Card cameras can be connected using their own USB connectors to transfer photos to the iPad.

For SD Cards its easy, just pop it out of your camera and plug it into the reader which connects to the iPad directly. We got mixed results when loading a card that came from a Canon T2i DSLR. The iPad recognized the card at once, fired up the photos application and quickly generated thumbnails of the photos.

You get the option of importing all of the photos or a selection which you can choose by checking photos individually. We found that the iPad choked when importing from a selection and the Photo app but seemed to run better when we chose to import all. The problem is that the iPad seems to have a hard time importing files from that particular SD Card, possibly because of the large 18 Megapixel file sizes. We tried another SD Card, this time from an Olympus camera with 12 Megapixel files and these imported quickly and without a problem. It's likely that the glitch with the earlier SD Card was a fluke but we'll try it again and report back.

Connecting the Kit's USB connector to an iPhone was painless. As shown in the video below, the iPad simply swallows up the images from the connected iPhone. Maybe the way smaller images or the fact that the iPhone was powering part of the transfer was the difference maker but we felt that it worked as advertised.

 There are a couple of remarkable features to the iPad's handling of photos. For one thing it can read RAW images much like a desktop Mac or PC can. For photographers who shoot RAW+JPEG, both files are absorbed into the iPad even if only the lower resolution JPEG is what you will be able to access. How do you get rid of the large RAW files if you can't access them via the iPad?

Simply fire up iPhoto the next time you connect your iPad to your Mac and you can manage the files easily there. We haven't tried it on the PC yet but we're pretty sure that once the iPad is recognized, any image editing tool should do the job.

Photos that are imported into the iPad currently have limited use. Sure you can look at them, turn them into slideshows, email them and upload them to different online services but you can't really move them out of the All Imported and Last Imported folders. Oh, the connector kit has also been able to import video in .MOV format at 640x480 resolution, not bad.

The iPad camera connector kit isn't for everyone. Photographers on location can benefit from using the iPad as backup storage as well as a way to view and share their photos and the options for the USB connector are expected to grow. We're hoping to see functionality that allows the iPad to be used as an external monitor for photos and video which would allow some form of a live view feature.

The potential of the USB connector is what has us excited. Aside from keyboards and USB headphones, there are a gamut of devices that could be made to work with the iPad. Too bad the iPhone doesn't yet have tethering enabled since this would be a good way to share data across devices.

The iPad camera connector kit works as promised despite some early glitches and despite the $35 price tag, its an accessory that iPad owning photographers are better off with, than without.

Rating 3.5 out of 5