I’m a total photo junky. anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis probably understands this. As we get our gear situated for our trip to Asia, I’ve begun thinking about my photo gear. what to pack, to leave home and what to buy, to have an optimum amount of gear with the least weight.
Check this out: I’m not bringing a laptop. that’s two solid months with no regular use of a computer. Oh, we’ll duck into internet cafes, for sure, but I haven’t been without a computer, this long, since high school.
My idea is to invest in some sort of portable storage / multimedia viewer device that I can download cf cards to, on the go and then bring the device in to the internet cafe to have the files burned onto DVD. This keeps my gear small and light and allows me to shoot ’til my heart’s content. A device with 80 gigs of storage, I could go for weeks without hitting the cafe and with 120 gigs, i could conceivably go the entire trip, although out of safety concerns, this isn’t the best idea (if our gear ever got stolen, the photos would be the most stinging loss).
I shoot 4 gigabytes of photos on a near daily basis. 12 megapixel RAW files really chew up hard disk space. In hopes of using my 60gig iPod as a portable storage device, I bought the Apple Camera Connector. It took 2 hours to transfer 3.5 gigs of files. The entire ipod battery life was used up and most of the battery life on my Canon 5D, in addition, there is no preview for RAW files on the iPod. In other words, the experiment didn’t work. There are soome card readers, that the camera connector works with, although admittedly I haven’t found any that work.
Since then I’ve been researching several different models of varied pricing. Epson and Jobo make excellent high end multimedia devices, perfect if you’re rich and your girlfriend doesn’t watch you bank account. But for those of us who don’t have that much scratch lying around, there are several lower end options. here’s a pretty good chart of what’s currently available, that I found over on the thorntree forums. My favorites are the Vosonic and the Hyperdrive. Both have similar pricing. The Vosonic beats out all the higher end devices on hard drive space and color screen, but it seems that it’s on back order or it’s pricing may have been a fluke (rulex was lucky enough to get one and i get to play with it tomorrow). The Hyperdrive doesn’t come with a fancy screen, but it’s got great hard drive space, it’s light and it can take up to 120gb of photo transfers before the AA batteries die. now that’s cool. On the flip side though, it would be nice to be able to preview my images and delete ones that i know aren’t gonna work. saves time at the internet cafe for sure.
Needless to say, I’m still researching all this action. what sez you?
Hope you have info about Asian internet cafes that supports your DVD idea–my experience in October in Australia and New Zealand was that most internet cafes did not have any provision for such a thing. In fact most of them would not let you do ANYTHING with files whatsoever (not even download email attachments). We did see one that had USB ports for flash memory devices, but no CD/DVD writers. I’m working on a scheme to carry two (for backup) portable HD storage devices for my next trip–even the 3-pound laptop I took on the last one put my carry-on over the limit, and Quantas actually weighed it in Alice Springs and made me take some stuff out of it.