Just as our MacBook Pro Thunderbolt high is starting to fade, we get a fresh syringe of hype straight to the neck: Nikon’s impending D4 might offer support for Intel’s superduperfast connection. And this would be a huge lifesaver.
Why’s this so exciting? Try shooting a memory card’s worth of 1080p video and RAW files, and then have fun transferring all that. You’ll be able to feel your hair growing. We’d love to be able to ditch USB 2.0’s 20ish megabytes per second in favour of Thunderbolt’s (theoretical) transfer max a little north of a gigabyte per second. Even if speeds fall short of their theoretical peak (which is a safe bet), being able to zap over a full card’s worth of data in seconds instead of minutes would spare many a multimedia headache.
To wit: transferring a 1.3 GB 1080p video file off my DSLR just took a little over ten minutes via USB. Over Thunderbolt, it would (theoretically) take around a second or two.
It’s only a matter of time until Thunderbolt is thundering its way across a slew of cameras, but please, let this first rumour be true. We’re sick of waiting. [Nikon Rumors]