Your opinions please....

I read about LBA, but for me, LBA is simply a subset of EGBA. (Electronig Gadget Buying Addiction) I've always been enticed by electronic gadgets, and lately I've been looking at the portable data vaults (or the multimedia players with built in card readers and hard drives)... There are a few different sizes and brands available, but I was wondering...

Are they worth it ? Or would I be better off taking that money and buying a big handful of SD cards...?

Heck, 60 to 80 gigs is a LOT of pictures, but do I want to "put all my eggs in one basket", but there's the possibility to use it for other purposes data-wise or entertainment-wise perhaps, but for the same money I could probably get 30 - 40 gigs worth of SD cards... And I'm never away from my PC for more than a couple days (I get D.T.'s even considering it...) And theres the whole Solid-state vs. moving parts argument...

Aaarrrggghhh... Too many variables.... Brain melting.... Urk...

What's your experience / opinion ?

Ipod or more memory cards. Nothing else makes sense to me.

Big value pack of 2GB Extreme III SD cards... That's 20x2GB... 40GB!!!

Don

I had looked at the Ipods, but didn't see how to hook up an SD - now I see the camera dongle - do you have it? How do the pictures actually look onscreen (though that's not a huge consideration...)

Is there any alternate method of reading SD's without hooking the camera to the Ipod? Could you plug in a generic USB card reader?

I think belkin makes an ipod card reader. havn't used it.
Have given away ipod videos to clients, my stepson has one but I do not. I use ample memory cards, and my macbook.
but I'd sooner buy the ipod than say an epson 5000, because, face it, I'll be listening to music more often than dumping images onto it.
The screens on the ipod videos are astounding. small, but simply great quality.

I have a Vosonic V2160

no playback facility but it uses standard lappy hard drives so if for some reason 40GB is not enough then it can be upgraded.

Nice little unit and a LOT cheaper and smaller than 40GB worth of fast flash.

This is what I am contemplating:

http://tinyurl.com/3ytbvh

It looks to me like an Ipod without the screen. It's much the same cost as other portable storage units at the cheap end of the scale, but if you have access to a screen of some sort, you can play back whatever is on the drive. If you haven't, you can't.

The drawback, as I see it, is that many hotel TVs probably lack any sort of video-in other than the aerial. And I doubt if this thing has TV aerial output.

G

one thing to watch out for with these things in general is battery life.

It generally isn't quoted in useful units.

I have a Tatung Elio MP3 player which has an SD card slot and USB OTG capability for downloading cameras. It sounds great, but what they fail to mention is that the transfer rate is unbearably slow (~20mins to copy a 1GB card) and the battery is only good for about 2-3GB worth of transfer. Not that useful.

My Vosonic can transfer ~10 GB on a charge and does 1GB in about 5 minutes. Still not class leading, but good enough.

I have a SmartDisk FlashTrax - ideal for the *ist D. Not for the K10D because

a) I had to find an adaptor...
b) it's only 20Gb and as mentioned above, transfer rate is s l o w and batteries die quickly..

I'm looking at laptop computers now...

I have had the Smartdisk Flashtrax for some time now.
I have an adaptor for the SD cards. And it's no longer 40Gb... but 160Gb
(Really, really easy to upgrade.)

Yes, it's slow at copying, but I have 5Gb of cards so I transfer at the end of the day while connected to mains. It's pretty quick when used as a USB drive though

And amazingly it reads the thumbnail in all the PEF files, including the K10D.
Matt

The K10D RAW files are smaller!

But the transfer rate is slow, and I find the battery doesn't hold it's charge for long, just a week at most, so can easily be dead just when you need it. However, like Matt, I tend to find myself backing up at the end of a day using the mains.

Dan

Ditto, ditto, ditto.

Decided to get something better , checked prices , horrendous for one with a decent screen , just ordered a sub £400 Dell laptop , not very portable but has (hopefully) a decent screen plus some processing ability .

Anyway, if I am going to "wait until I get back to the hotel" pocket-sized portability is not that important, and the kids can do without a little of their inheritance.

This looks like something worth investigating further, but I see another drawback for myself - it isn't self-powered (battery)... I'd like the capability to use it without looking for mains or AC adapters and such... (well, in between recharges anyway...)

I have a laptop, but was looking for something pocketable, or semi-pocketable, something that would fit into my camera bag...

Tyr, you said :


Is that an actual retail pkg, do you have a URL ?

I've got my old 80Gb laptop hard drive in a no-brand "Digimate II plus" portable USB enclosure, which was about £20 on ebay. It's great, and much more convenient than taking your laptop wherever you go. Less risky, too.

Can't take issue with either battery life or transfer speed. It copies a 1Gb card about as fast as you could copy to a computer, and I don't think I've ever really had to charge it. It came with a charger, but it seems to top itself up each time you connect it to the computer.

You can't see the pictures until you get them home of course, but then why would you want to?

Steve

http://www.siblingmedia.com/