The iPad Camera Connection Kit is more useful than I thought
The iPad Camera Connection kit is already quite a useful device with its ability to connect to audio devices as well as MIDI devices on top of the default photo features. The latter is something I haven’t used too often, but today I found a use for it- and it’s more useful than I thought.
As I already wrote in another post, I got a new camera today. When I went to take out the SD card just now it was stuck in the camera! After I finally got it out, I saw that a piece of plastic had broken off and jammed the thing. This is the second time this happens with a SanDisk card in a month, and I’m beginning to lose faith in them as a memory card manufacturer. I needed to get what was on the card off it, so after I removed the plastic piece that had broken off I tried both the internal SD reader of my laptop and an external USB card reader. I couldn’t get it into the former due to the missing plastic messing with the spring release, and the latter couldn’t read the card even if I got it in there. I tried the iPad SD adapter as a last option, and lo and behold it worked.
When I got the pictures and videos off the cards, I discovered that the iPad could in fact play back the HD videos from the camera. I knew it had the capability to play imported videos like that, but I always assumed that seeing how annoying the iPad is with codecs normally, there wasn’t much of a chance that it would be able to play the format used by my camera (even if it was h.264). I might just have been lucky, but still awesome.
What impressed me even more though was that the YouTube upload feature worked with the huge HD videos created by my camera. I always liked uploading videos with the iPhone because it’s only a couple of clicks and it’s uploading, rather than opening a browser, going to YouTube, etc. It does however compress the videos before uploading, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on how fast your connection is. If you’re a tech blogger who’s visiting CES or some similar event it might actually be a blessing, as it allows you to shoot video using a much better camera than you find on mobile devices and get it uploaded extremely quickly, without even having to sit down. Slow Internet speeds at such events won’t be a problem due to the video compression, and you’ll still have the original files so you can upload the full quality version later. However, it does mean you have to upload from a computer if you want maximum quality.
With the iPad, you simply insert the SD card into the adapter, the import screen launches automatically, you select your video, click import, then find the video in the album and click “send to YouTube”. This is so much easier than trying to deal with a laptop when walking around. Of course this is useful in other situations as well, such as vacations etc. A 64GB iPad can store a lot of video and photos and you’ll be able to give friends and family at home a sneak peak at your trip without spending 3 hours connected to the hotel’s slow WiFi connection.The fact it has finger friendly photo and video editing apps doesn’t hurt either.
This still doesn’t mean I want an SD card reader on the iPad 2. It don’t like gadgets that look like swiss cheese and considering how much internal space a card reader takes up I’m quite alright with using my adapter.
