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Hi Lester
Cameras capture a lot of data that needs to be sent to your computer hard disk, quickly. Firewire and USB are high speed data buses designed to manage these large volumes of video (and audio) data.
I think that The Imaging Source Firewire camera are Firewire version IEEE 1394a, designed to transfer data at 400 MB per second, and The Imaging Source USB camera are USB2, designed to transfer data at 480 MB per second.
I also understand that as there is some overhead in how each implementation works; the actual speeds are always less that 400 and 480 MB/s respectively. Allegedly, in the real world, it appears that Firewire (at 400MB/s) actually has a greater throughput that USB2 (at 480MB/s).
I have also read that there is a Firewire version IEEE 1394b at 800MB/s and a new USB3 which is to be released soon.
However, in practical terms, it seems the bottleneck on our laptop computers tends to be the speed at which the data can be written to our hard disks. Desktops Hard disk drives tend to operate at 7200rpm whereas laptop HDD’s tend to run at 5400rpm, some older models even at 4000rpm.
So, I suspect that if you have a modern laptop, in terms of speed, Firewire or USB will be okay, it just depends on ease of connectivity and getting sufficient power to the camera.
I have a Firewire DMK and have to use a powered PCMCIA card to connect it to, which is not as elegant a just plugging a USB camera into a USB2 port on your computer.
Cheers
Dennis
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