That said, an USB2 or Firewire card reader is about 3x as fast as the camera-to-computer method. The only thing you get from a special program is the ability to view or edit images at the same time, which is unnecessary and usually undesirable. You must configure the Nikon camera in its menue to be a data storage device (rather than a remote device). Whether you use a card reader or connect directly to the camera, the basic process is nothing more than a file transfer, which you can do with standard operating system tools (e.g., Microsoft Explorer).