iPad Camera Connectivity

After doing a little reading up on Apple's website, they have announced that they will be releasing a "Camera Connection Kit" for the iPad.

According to the information on the iPad website...

"The Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera. The Camera Connector lets you import your photos and videos to iPad using the camera’s USB cable. Or you can use the SD Card Reader to import photos and videos directly from the camera’s SD card."

So that solves at least one of my problems.  I generally use 8Gb 60MB/sec Sandisk Extreme CompactFlash cards for shooting stills on the D300s, but as it has a dual card slot, I have a 16Gb Integral SDHC card that I use for shooting the HD video.

So, I can whip the SDHC card out of the camera, slot it into the SDHC reader on the iPad, and then view the footage as soon as the data has copied over (no indication of transfer speeds released yet though).  Or, presumably I'll be able to play straight back from the card itself if necessary.  Depending on the ultimate speed available when transferring from SDHC to the iPad, I may have to invest in a faster SDHC card for this purpose.  As the D300s requires a relatively low speed to record and playback 720p HD video in realtime, I went cheap with a class 4 card (a mere 4MB/sec).

The other adapter is a little more confusing to me as such little information (none, basically) has been released on the iPad.  On my D200, the USB port can operate on two different modes; either USB Mass Storage or Peer 2 Peer mode.  In Mass Storage mode, when hooked up to the PC, it simply shows up as an extra removable drive in explorer.  In P2P mode it actually recognises it as a camera device (the same as it does with my Samsung Omnia windows mobile phone).

On the D300s, the camera only seems to operate in P2P mode (if there is an option to change that, I've yet to find it, although I haven't really looked all that hard).

Some cameras are Mass Storage mode only, and some cameras are P2P only.  Will the iPad be able to acknowledge and access both?

If it will access images from digital cameras USB Mass Storage mode, does that mean then that I will also be able to hook up a USB hard drive that has its own external power source (without using the iPad dock)?  Or a USB CompactFlash reader so that I can transfer still images that way instead of draining the camera's battery?