drawImage is usually faster. i think it's also more useful if you need alpha composition (overlays).

http://jsperf.com/canvas-drawimage-vs-putimagedata/11

also read this about imageData caching and explanations of the different opts. loop unrolling helps a bit, forget the typed array stuff for now, it wont work anywhere for some time.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/12/faster-canvas-pixel-manipul...