What are the pros and cons of high-speed USB versus high-speed FireWire? Is the latter obsolete?
I’ve just stopped consulting for a biomedical diagnostic company whose platform made use of some moderately high end digital photography as part of its analysis step, and many high end cameras only seemed to be available in a Firewire format. Indeed, at least some of the higher end software used for scientific and industrial applications did not support high volume data capture across USB last time I was investigating such things (remember that such behemoths tend to lag behind consumer equipment, sometimes by decades — RS232 interfaces are still quite standard in many applications following the if it isn’t broken then there’s no financial incentive to fix it credo). You observe that “the speeds are within a factor of two”. This is correct, Firewire800 can support raw data rates of 800Mbit / s whilst high-speed USB is somewhere below 500 Mbit /s. That matters: a lot. There is an awful lot of data in high grade video: 800 Mbit / s = 100 Mbytes / s Considering a humble 4 Mpixle image, s
