www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/technology/circuits/14pogue.html
Subscribe to Circuits Sign up to receive a free weekly Circuits newsletter by e-mail, with technology news and tips and exclusive commentary by David Pogue, the State of the Art columnist.
SAFE KEEPING - Among devices that can be used to store or display digital photographs are, from top, the Archos AV420, the Belkin Camera Link (used with the iPod Photo), the SmartDisk FlashTrax and the Epson P-2000, which has an impressive display screen (four times the resolution of its rivals). W HEN you really stop to think about it, memory cards are a pretty delicate storage format for something as important as your digital photos. So many things can happen to memory cards: they can get lost, stolen, corrupted or, in the case of those little tiny xD-Picture cards, blown into the next ZIP code when you sneeze. The point, of course, is that memory cards are designed for temporary storage inside the camera. Once the card is full, your photos desperately want to be transferred to some larger, safer, more permanent home. But hauling a laptop around on your sightseeing trips isn't always practical. Besides, it's like wearing a T-shirt that says, "I'm a Tourist - Rob Me" You could buy a whole bunch of memory cards, but that gets expensive. You could also buy a portable CD recorder (about $275) that burns photos right from the card, but that's bulky and slow.
Why can't someone invent a hand-held gadget that slurps photos off a memory card and onto a hard drive, so you can wipe the card clean and get back to shooting? Fortunately, several someones have invented just that: gadgets variously called photo vaults, photo wallets, digital photo viewers and mobile media hard drives. Or, if you have an iPod music player, you can turn it a photo vault, too, using adapters sold by Belkin and Apple, which has just introduced something called the iPod Photo Connector.
Archos, Nikon, SmartDisk, Jobo and others) have several advantages over the iPod adapters. First, they have much bigger screens, making it easy to show your pictures to your friends and delete the losers. Finally, these devices have their own battery packs and memory-card slots. When you transfer the pictures, in other words, you're not draining your camera's battery (as you would when connecting it to a laptop). That's important because when you're out and about, camera-battery juice is a precious resource. The photo vaults in this roundup - the Epson P-2000, Jobo GigaVu Pro, Archos AV420 and SmartDisk FlashTrax - present a wide range of choice in size, shape, bells and whistles. If your camera uses a smaller type, you're expected to provide your own card adapter. Nor is that the only virtue of the sleek black Epson ($500 online). The size, brightness and clarity of its 38-inch screen blows its competition off the equipment rack. Thanks to its supercrisp 640 by 480 pixels (four times the resolution of its rivals), photos look like glossy drugstore prints. Photo transfer is fast: just under two minutes for a 256-megabyte memory card filled with 103 pictures. This is also the only photo vault that's serious about slide shows: you can choose background music, and you can opt for gentle animated panning and cross-dissolving effects that lend a sweet, soft-focus, Hallmark Hall of Fame feeling. But at 58 by 33 by 12 inches, the Epson is not what you'd call petite. Now, the Archos ($450) was never intended to be a photo wallet; it began life as a pocket multimedia machine, capable of, for example, recording television shows (even unattended) so you can watch them on the road. But because it's so slim, so capacious (up to 100 gigabytes) and fast (1 minute 40 seconds to transfer that 256-meg card), photographers have begun adopting it for photo-offloading use.
|