Interesting news from Photokina is Canon announced the M80 and M30 media storage devices. With 80gb and 30gb capacity respectively they should prove popular if the price is right. I keep delaying looking too hard at these kinds of machines because of the price but this coming from Canon does look tempting.
Details at Canon UK
Canon today launches the portable devices, designed with EOS and other digital photographers in mind. The Canon Media Storage M30 and Canon Media Storage M80 devices feature a large ultra-bright 3.7” TFT screen with 160º viewing angle for image and video review, and a 30Gb/80Gb hard disk to store digital images, movie and sound files of various file formats. Both units feature a USB 2.0 Hi-Speed interface and slots for CF and SD cards.The Media Storage M30 and M80 feature:
- 30/80 Gb hard disk
- 3.7” ultra-bright TFT screen with 160º viewing angle
CF and SD card reader- USB 2.0 Hi-Speed connection
- Support for multiple image, video and sound file formats, including Canon RAW, MPEG, MP3 and WAV.
- Extended PictBridge functionality
- 4 – 8 digit image file password protection
- 1/8” audio-out headphone jack
Technorati Tags: canon, m30, m80, storage, cf, portable, gadgets, photography, news
6 Comments
I’ve owned an Image Tank G2 in the past and it has since died and am looking to replace it. I have several friends with the pd7x and one with the pd70x, both of which are impossible to find outside Australia now, but there is a bight side. A company called Hyperdrive seems to make the exact same thing, different sticker.
Real world info, from playing with one myself, it will transfer 1gb of images off a CF card in about 2 minutes flat.
If you don’t need to see the images, get one of these, they are way cheaper.
Looks useful, pop in some rechargeable and it could be a handy little gadget
Sounds good :O)
holy crap! I must have one of these… sounds like it’d be perfect – no need to lug the laptop on vacation to offload photos from the camera! And, you can view them on the device? Sweet. Didn’t see a price, though…
I expect the price will be quite close to a cheapy laptop but probably a fair bit more portable. For myself I pretty much always have the laptop and find the laptop far more useful but the recent airline rules changes mean gadget-desire is definitely starting to tingle ;O)
I’ve got a pd70x – and I love it. Not only can it transfer data fast – it can also snarf nearly 50 gigs worth of data off of CF cards on a single charge!
Plus – since it takes AA batteries, if i’m out travelling and the rechargables in there die off, I can get extra AA’s to drop in there.
Oh, and about those rechargable AA’s? If I plug this thing into a wall, and it’s got rechargables in it, i’ll recharge them for me too.
Unfortunately, it can be a bit on the heavy side. Also, the CF slot is fairly shallow – which can make inserting at an odd angle a little too easy (I think it might be deep enough to prevent you from being able to bend pins – which another cheap drive i had gotten was rendered useless rather quickly by). On the flip side, i’d call its construction fairly solid.
The interface to the computer is also USB 2, which makes it fairly snappy to use. I’m considering re-arranging how i’m doing things so that it becomes the permanent photo drive for my laptop (with a mirrored 300 GB system at home for long term storage) so that I can carry more than a few gigs of images with me at a time.