Canon publishes specs on their CRW format. There are a number of third party utilities that support this format. Mostly for Windows of course.

Sandisk has a number of products that work with both verions of Mac OS. However, they're not supporting their older line. In fact, the newer stuff should work with drivers built into OS X. I won't ever buy another Sandisk product anyway though. My Imagemate worked fine, but there's no need to keep releasing new versions of the same product without making any improvements - just making the old ones incompatible with the new driver software. Their products are very overpriced as well.

I'm using a Nikon 5700 right now. Low light problems or not, Canon doesn't have a single camera to touch it at this time. It can't be beat for image quality, features, size, ergonomics and control. You can aleviate the low-light focusing problems by using a laser pointer if you want to be creative. If you're using a tripod this is quite easy. Something I'll be investigating myself soon. Anyway, I'm currently not using a reader for my Windows machines nor Macs. Just connect the camera through USB as a mass-storage device. I'll grab a firewire reader soon. I'm not touching USB 2 with a 10 foot pole.

Stuff on the Mac does just tend to work. You just can't do as much with them nor as fast or stable as on a good Windows machine. Despite what the switch ads tell you. Hey, I make my living off Macs, so I'll always try to push them and our Mac products.

Bruno