Selective Memory
The Age
Thursday December 2, 2004
Digital wallets are a great way of freeing precious memory for more of your brilliant shots, says Charles Wright.
It's the season when digital photography enthusiasts suddenly discover the downside of being able to take lots of shots without having to buy film: a full memory card.Few things can cause more angst than having the perfect picture opportunity and a card that's already packed with other, hopefully perfect, pictures. Which ones do you delete?The mathematics are uncompromising. A 6-megapixel image saved at the sort of resolution that will give you the best choices for enlarging and more detail - fine, large JPG - takes up 2.9MB. You can fit 73 of them - equivalent to two 35mm films - on a 256MB card. Depending on the type of card - Compact Flash is the cheapest - this will cost between $95 and $135. Because doubling the capacity doesn't double the price, a 512MB card will cost between $180 and $280.Digital technology has taught us not to think in terms of film economics - a digital snap doesn't cost anything until you print it and the more you take, the more likely you are to end up with a masterpiece - but unless you're a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you're not likely to be able to store all the visual memories of a long trip on flash memory.If you're particularly extravagant, you might buy a 1GB memory card, which would set you back $270 in the case of Compact Flash, and $550 for a Sony Memory Stick.That's why a lot of users turn to something called a "digital wallet" - essentially a battery-powered hard drive with anywhere from 20 to 80GB of capacity in a small case. They allow you to plug in various cards, transfer the contents and start snapping away again.The price varies from about $300 to $650, depending on hard drive size and whether they have a built-in LCD to allow you to view the images and, perhaps, other applications. The 20GB iRiver MP3 player, for instance, will double as a portable image storage device and is about $500.That means that for the price of a 1GB memory card it is possible to buy 20GB of portable storage.That's the sort of solution Sydney-based enthusiast Guy Parsons decided on before he took a trip to New Zealand earlier this year. He and his wife had three cameras between them, with a 512MB card and two 256MB cards. He bought a Vosonic X'S drive (powerinnumbers.com.au), but found he was worried about the fact that he could not determine whether his images had actually been transferred. While later models have screens, Parsons decided to buy a second-hand laptop - a Toshiba Portege 7020CT. It was a comparatively vintage machine with a slow processor, but it was able to run the newer, more picture-aware Windows XP, and it also had a 13-inch screen. According to Parsons, you need that sort of screen size to really determine whether a shot is out of focus or blurred. He believes the LCD screens on the camera, and even the larger versions of digital wallets, are not quite clear enough.He added a PCMCIA adaptor ($30) that allowed him to plug the memory card directly into the PC for faster and more convenient, file transfers - although he could have added a USB model. The total investment was $1000.Parsons has found that with digital cameras, experienced photo tourists these days tend to take a lot of extra photographs to help them identify their memories later.Professional photographer Andy Biggs (naturescapes.net/052004/ab0504.htm) uses both digital wallet and laptop on his trips. He says digital wallets offer the advantage of multiple sources of power and they're not as vulnerable as laptops to poblems caused by dust.His approach is to use the digital wallet during the day and transfer the shots to the laptop back at base at night.One other advantage of a laptop is that, in many places, it allows you to connect to the internet and upload images to online albums.
© 2004 The Age