In field Storage Devices

[okane]

This past weekend, like most weekends, Deb (My better half) and I head up North for the weekend, for some R&R and photography. This normally involves hitting the trail on a couple of ATV's or the snowmobile.

With the advent of digital photography, we find we can really fill up a memory card quite quickly regardless of the size, depending upon what format we are saving in. We shoot mostly jpeg fine, Jpeg+Raw, or Raw. Sure we carry a few memory cards with us, but they all seem to fill up, or we forgot to format one of the cards and cannot remember if we download the pictures.

On occasion we tracked in a laptop with us, although not exactly quite that portable it served a purpose.

This past weekend, a friend offered to loaned us a demo Epson P-3000 Storage Viewer. Needless to say we accepted the offer and off we went.

Sure enough we reached a point where the memory cards began to fill up quite quickly. The Epson unit came to the rescue, fantastic, just slip the memory card in, backup the card, check the quantity of shots downloaded, delete the card and format and we are off again.

What a great tool/toy. When we got back we purchased one. If any of you experience this sort of problem, I would recommend either an Epson or one of the other storage viewers on the market. It really solves the problem of a full memory card.

[Pete Nolan]

Thanks, Owen.

I've heard that they've grown up a lot!

I bought a portable disk three years ago that would run out of juice backing up one 512M card. Up in Alaska I was filling up 4 Gbyte cards. Luckily our hosts had a laptop.

[BoxcabE50]

What kind of storage capacity does a unit like this possess? Is there a web site, where we could read a few product reviews?

:D

Boxcab E50

[okane]

Ken

Here is the link to the unit we purchased. It has a 40 GIG hard drive.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=6306106

Select the digital photography selection and the P-3000 will show on the next page

[BoxcabE50]

Owen-

At first glance, I didn't see much information detailed. Good thing you mentioned it's 40GB capacity. How does it connect to a home PC? Via USB cable? Or?

:D

Boxcab E50

[okane]

It connects to the PC by USB. The unit detects the PC and downloads a software application from the unit to transfer the files. Standard cable to run to camera as well, or put the memory card in the slot.

Quite a fast download not only from the card to the P3000, also from the P3000 to the PC. Much faster than downloading from the camera to the PC.

I really like this toy, can you tell.

[Pete Nolan]

Owen,

How is the viewer on this model? Accurate? Big enough to tell?

I've found that I can't really judge a picture until I get it on an Apple Cinema display. The on-camera display is pretty useless. The D70 histogram is green channel only, which is also pretty useless, as green is the first channel to burn out. The highlight warning, though, is pretty good.

[okane]

Peter

The display screen is 4 inches. When compared to the screen on The D70 or D200, it is certainly an improvement. There is an option to zoom in at preset settings of 100, 200 and 400 percent, and then you can scrowl around the screen.

It also displays the exif settings along with a histogram. Not sure what color channel it is displaying though.

All in all we like it. It really came in handy this past weekend again. So this is now a part of our kit when in the field. If you have a chance, drop by your local photo supply store and check it out.

I think you would find it handy, especially on those Alaska trips.

[Pete Nolan]

I was thinking of Alaska. We're going to the real boonies next time, which has been postponed to 2008, as I have a daughter getting married this summer of 2007, and can't afford both.