card and pull up the RAW file in some sort of capture program, maybe Canons DPP. I can do this to my work laptop and eventually my iMac. This way I can show the client their portrait photos immediately, process them and turn the photo around quickly. Aparently a place in the mall called The Picture People used to do this but they went out of business and a co-worker needs a portrait of her daughter for a dance competition. I just thought this could be a cool way to reduce steps in my digital workflow. Comments?

Sounds like it could be very useful in certain situations.

my strobes let me :( Will writing to the computer be via USB 2.0 be slower than directly to the card, probably. But it can't take over 3-5 sec for my cheapo strobes to recylce.

The 20D writes to CF at ~9 MB/s, IIRC. USB 2.0 is theoretically 480 Mb/s or 60 MB/s. Actual throughput is a bit less. Whether the 9 MB/s limit is for all the interfaces on the camera or just for CF, I don't know. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say USB 2.0 won't speed up the process or impede it, either. I've never tried it, so take all this with a grain of salt.

I plan on doing this when I capture images of a series of drawings.

I did some tests with my leica hooked up to the imac. The image on screen is poor and the adjustments I can make are not as thorough as doing it at the camera. However, this setup is well suited to doing many sequential shots because the software allows for lots of timed exposure options. edit: on the plus side you get a massive histogram diagram. plus, writing direct to the hard drive is nice - you can open it up in photoshop right there and then.

Takes a couple seconds to transfer but nothing unbearable (i would guess ~10 secs total from shot to displaying on the screen, which includes C1Pro creating a preview of a 16MP raw file). i'll occasionally shoot off a few in quick succession but the bottleneck is the strobes needing to recycle and not the transfer to the computer (it'll get buffered as well).

Hard to tell in this pic, but i'm looking at the laptop (dell 600m) in the lower right, which is running C1Pro that's tethered to a 1Ds MK II via a ~25 foot firewire cable (which i'm holding in my hand)
<img src="http://www.funkadelic.org/i/misc/wayot/calendar/_MG_3938.jpg">

recycle times are usually around 3-5sec. Thanks for the info, I've heard great things about Capture One, great Raw conversion utility.

it's great tool to recheck the focus for since we use MF.

Maybe that's why that studio went out of biz.

To me as a client, if a result is right there on the spot, it looks like I overpaid. If there is time (= effort, expertise, money) involved, a higher price is more justifiable.

Just a thought.