Thursday, December 22, 2005
Portable photo storage
I use a 60 gig iPod Photo to store my pictures. With the Camera Connector attachment, it’s capable of copying pictures directly off my camera, so I don’t have to carry a laptop or large capacity card when doing a long shoot. I couldn’t have covered Angkor without it.
The iPod’s expensive for a portable storage solution, but it also doubles as a very nice music player, so I’m pretty happy with my iPod+D70 combo. Except, there’s one teeny little problem:
The D70 is advertised as USB 2.0, but only does USB 1.1 “full speed”, 12 Mbps. A 500 MB card takes half an hour to read. If you keep a hard disk spinning for half an hour, you can expect that whatever battery is supporting it will take a big hit. With the iPod, that’s a third of its battery capacity. If I remember to charge it overnight (usually don’t), I get between two and three copy sessions in a day. About 1.5 gigs of pictures. Don’t look incredulous, that’s perfectly normal for a place like Angkor.
Besides, there’s the half hour of twiddling thumbs while both camera and music player are out of commission. It doesn’t pass easily.
So this is not good, right? The obvious solution is to stick the CF card in a speedy card reader and feed that to the iPod, right? Well, I tried, and it doesn’t work. “unsupported device”, says the iPod. Which is perplexing because the iPod will read off the camera in both mass storage and PTP modes, and a card reader is technically just another mass storage device. I tried another and it didn’t work either.
Then one day I plugged the card reader into a Windows machine and it showed up as multiple new drives, of which only one would work. Which was even more perplexing, until I noticed there was one drive per slot in the reader. It was one of those all-in-one types. So could that be the iPod’s problem? It’s confused by multiple devices on the line? Maybe it would work with a card reader that reports as a single drive? Even all knowing Google didn’t know for sure.
The hunt for a CF-only card reader began. I did thorough searches of the electronics malls in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. No one had a CF-only device. They had xD-only and MS-only and SD-only and all-in-one readers, but nobody had a CF-only. It’s like nobody cares for CF anymore (which is true, the DSLRs are among the last holdouts).
Today in Singapore’s Sim Lim mall, I finally found one. It was clearly a CF-only reader and claimed USB 2.0 compliance. It cost 25 SGD, which is a bit too much for a card reader, but if it could cut transfer time from half an hour to three minutes, heck, it would be worth far more than that price. I happily brought it home.
The iPod said “unsupported device”.
The iPod’s expensive for a portable storage solution, but it also doubles as a very nice music player, so I’m pretty happy with my iPod+D70 combo. Except, there’s one teeny little problem:
The D70 is advertised as USB 2.0, but only does USB 1.1 “full speed”, 12 Mbps. A 500 MB card takes half an hour to read. If you keep a hard disk spinning for half an hour, you can expect that whatever battery is supporting it will take a big hit. With the iPod, that’s a third of its battery capacity. If I remember to charge it overnight (usually don’t), I get between two and three copy sessions in a day. About 1.5 gigs of pictures. Don’t look incredulous, that’s perfectly normal for a place like Angkor.
Besides, there’s the half hour of twiddling thumbs while both camera and music player are out of commission. It doesn’t pass easily.
So this is not good, right? The obvious solution is to stick the CF card in a speedy card reader and feed that to the iPod, right? Well, I tried, and it doesn’t work. “unsupported device”, says the iPod. Which is perplexing because the iPod will read off the camera in both mass storage and PTP modes, and a card reader is technically just another mass storage device. I tried another and it didn’t work either.
Then one day I plugged the card reader into a Windows machine and it showed up as multiple new drives, of which only one would work. Which was even more perplexing, until I noticed there was one drive per slot in the reader. It was one of those all-in-one types. So could that be the iPod’s problem? It’s confused by multiple devices on the line? Maybe it would work with a card reader that reports as a single drive? Even all knowing Google didn’t know for sure.
The hunt for a CF-only card reader began. I did thorough searches of the electronics malls in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. No one had a CF-only device. They had xD-only and MS-only and SD-only and all-in-one readers, but nobody had a CF-only. It’s like nobody cares for CF anymore (which is true, the DSLRs are among the last holdouts).
Today in Singapore’s Sim Lim mall, I finally found one. It was clearly a CF-only reader and claimed USB 2.0 compliance. It cost 25 SGD, which is a bit too much for a card reader, but if it could cut transfer time from half an hour to three minutes, heck, it would be worth far more than that price. I happily brought it home.
The iPod said “unsupported device”.
code_martial — Dec 21, 2005 10:10:08 PM — # ↩
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Dec 21, 2005 10:11:56 PM — # ↩
brainz — Dec 21, 2005 10:53:03 PM — # ↩
BTW, I still have your USB hand fan, I found a good use for it. It blows the dust out of my CPU.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Dec 22, 2005 10:08:01 AM — # ↩
BTW, USB fans are hot here. Nearly every store is selling them. Wonder what people do with one.
brainz — Dec 22, 2005 10:18:20 AM — # ↩
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Dec 22, 2005 10:20:10 AM — # ↩
Anonymous — Dec 21, 2005 10:50:45 PM — # ↩
Krishna(http://crawls.blogspot.com)
arunshanbhag — Dec 21, 2005 10:53:02 PM — # ↩
While in Hospet, Karnataka, the local cyber cafe agreed to help me download my pics to their computer and burn a CD for me. Cost 75 rupees. Something like that should be a possibility in Singapore.
Also confirms I will have to carry my laptop around and multiple cards.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Dec 22, 2005 10:11:13 AM — # ↩
swamysk — Dec 21, 2005 11:25:30 PM — # ↩
tsk1979 — Dec 21, 2005 11:56:23 PM — # ↩
Try a different brand!
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Dec 22, 2005 10:06:01 AM — # ↩
If it came in a slide-open kind of covering, pretty much any dealer is happy to let you try it out.
drkishoremurthy — Dec 22, 2005 12:25:11 AM — # ↩
Anonymous — Dec 22, 2005 12:02:10 PM — # ↩
Check this out
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/external/photo/100375652a.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/photo_camera_comp.html
http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/flash
Regards,
Gowtham PR