As you can possibly gather, I am an avid photographer (some would say “rabid”) – and new digital cameras allow you to take many photos, experimenting with different angles, lighting, composition and such. With the high resolution photos that modern cameras produce, filling up a memory card can be quite quick.
I bought a 384MB Compact Flash card to use with my 5 megapixel Canon S50 – I would have bought the 512MB card, but nobody seemed to have them in stock at the time.
Even at the highest resolution JPEG setting, I can still fit around 257 photos on that card, and I have only ever filled it up once on an outing (last weekend in Las Vegas when we did Hoover Dam and Red Rock Canyon in one day). I had the original 32MB card that came with the camera as a spare, but it wouldn’t really hold enough at the resolution I prefer to take them at.
While reading some digital photography forums on the internet, someone mentioned about a portable USB 2.0 hard drive that also has a compact flash interface. The idea is that if you run out of space in the field away from your computer, you can dump the contents of the CF card to the portable hard drive and then continue taking photos.
I had a look at the [url=http://www.ht.com.au/]Harris Technology[/url] website for something like that mentioned on the forum, and discovered something very similar…
The [url=http://www.ht.com.au/Scripts/xworks.exe?PART:H0497#Tof]Aplux CF+ USB Portable Smart Storage 20Gb[/url]. As the description mentions, it is exactly as I described, a battery powered 20GB USB 2.0 hard drive with built in CF reader which can be used without connection to a computer… ideal for extended photoshoots in the field. HT currently sells them for about $450, which is a little pricey for only 20GB, so I’ll keep my eyes open for an alternative that is more reasonably priced.
One day when I move into Digital SLRs, something like this will come in very handy I feel.
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