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We are soon going to Europe for 2 months and with a D2X and a D70s both shooting RAW, we anticipate needing a lot of file storage (and I mean lots - 4 weeks in South America totalled about 150gb) and prefer to leave the laptop at home. Via the internet, I have found the following 2 portable card readers/DVD burners:
1. JOBO ImageMaestro PRO
2. Delkin Devices DVD Burnaway
They are priced about the same and I have found differing reviews. Reading the reviews I have found, it may be prefereable to take the laptop with us.
Are there any watchers who have used either of these units, and what are your thoughts about them?

When Pat and I went to Vietnam we took blank CDs/DVDs with us and found no shortage of internet cafes willing to burn DVDs for us for a small fee. May work out cheaper for you than spending hundreds of $$ on a portable burner. We also kind of enjoyed the time it gave us to write/check emails and catch up on news at home. It's a matter of choice, but just a suggestion for you to consider.

Hi photograham, possibly you should consider taking an OTG case with a laptop drive inside.

Donna and I had a trip through the centre back in June-July. We took a new laptop along to store our piccies and burn them to DVD. As well we were able to view them after a day of sight seeing and remind ourselves of our days activities. We found this worked really well.

On our return to the big smoke we heard a few stories of people having PC problems and they had lost their HDD contents - which made us glad we had kept copies on DVD as well.

We also decided we needed further backup storage. As we like to travel I looked for and found these cases (OTG - On The Go) which take laptop drives. They have a battery power (which can be plugged in if required) and you just plug the camera to USB plug into the OTG case and press copy. They can also be plugged into a Laptop or PC using the USB cables (ours has an additional USB power cable which can also be used should you not have sufficient power). They are just mass storage devices - we had ours formatted FAT32 and away we went.

Then you can format the CF card (or whatever you use) and start over again. The drawback with these is that they do not have a screen to view the files but they seem to work fine (there may be some available with screens too). Plug it into a PC and you can view them by selecting the drive.

Hope this gives you another alternative to consider.

Cheers, Mick

Thanks Macka & Oscar for your replies. Will have a look at those DVD burners.
I forgot to mention in my original post rhat for 5 weeks of our trip, we will be on a tour and thus time to do burning etc will be limited.

The case I bought for this was the Noontec OT25. I have a 120gb lappie drive in mine. The case is approx 125 X 80 X 18mm and when packed in its case with the cables and battery case is 130 X 82 X 48mm. You could fit the drive/case in one pocket and cables/batery pack in another pocket if you do not need the carry case.

There are other similar cases and they can take larger Lappie drives.

Cheers, Mick

I've used the CD burning predecessor to these drives, and I was quite unimpressed. To the point where if you want the thing you can have it.

Things to be careful of:
- if you're not going to have mains power, *exactly* how many disks can it burn and verify on batteries (for the Apacer Disk Steno the answer is "approximately one").
- what disks work, what disks don't (the Apacer is very fussy, some brands have a <10% success rate).
- how fast does it burn? How fast does it verify? The Apacer burns fairly fast, but verifying is very, very slow - all up around 10-15 minutes to burn and verify a CD at 16x or 24x burn speed (whatever it is).
- will it burn when you're moving? (not jogging, but in a boat or a campervan or whatever). The Apacer will not, and bumping the table while it's burning almost guarantees a dud disk.
- is it reliable enough to avoid having to verify every disk? Are you willing to take the chance just to save time? How much time does verifying take?

I found that I wanted to burn and verify two copies of each disk, and the success rate was quite low doing that - with a 2GB card I had to burn 6 disks without an error, and an error on the last disk of a spanned set of 3 meant starting all over again. With DVDs and 4GB cards you should be fine, I suggest not buying an 8GB card for the trip just to avoid spanning issues.

I'd love to hear how you go because I travel fairly often but I'm reluctant to pay anothre $500 to find out that the DVD burners are no better than the CD burner I already have.

For the money you can probably get a pair of 12GB portable hard disks, and carry one each. Then burn DVDs in internet cafes as you go if you want to. Even at $10/DVD you can burn a lot of DVDs for the cost of a portable DVD drive... unless you're well off the beaten trail you are probably better off doing that.

Thnks Moz for your information. As at the present time, I think I have decided to carry the laptop for the trip. Whilst it will be a bit of a bother at times (our trip includes a 35 day coach tour), I will at least be able to keep a check on what we are shooting and can verify disc burns straight away.

photograham wrote:2. Delkin Devices DVD Burnaway

I bought this same unit (different name, but same product) recently and have found it very capable. I'm very impressed that it writes to all the different CD/DVD types I can throw at it, and can play back (on TV) almost any media file format. The battery life is sufficient to sustain at least 1 full DVD burn, or 3-4hrs of DVD movie playback. So it may be a concern if you do not have access to a power source (since it uses a proprietary battery pack). The other concern I have is that they no longer seem to have an Aussie distributor, so warranty can be a problem later... I bought mine for $150 on a clearance, but I understand that the normal RRP is much higher.

moz wrote:For the money you can probably get a pair of 12GB portable hard disks, and carry one each.

Good advice right there!!

It's always very good to have two copies of the data from your CF card before erasing, particularly so when you're traveling where you have fewer opportunities to closely critique before erasing. The chances of getting something stolen or lost are also far more likely.

When I travel (admitted usually with my MacBook), I also backup the CF copy to my 60GB iPod. After this, either the iPod or MacBook are exactly where I can keep an eye on them or with me - so if the 'Book is back at the hotel, I have the iPod on me. If I lose the iPod, I have the other copy, likewise if the MacBook is stolen. If it's an extended trip, I'll burn a DVD and mail it back to work/home.

Now obviously you're not taking a notebook, but if you have a pair of portable hard disks like Moz has suggested, the same benefits apply... but keep them separate!

Above all, enjoy the trip!

Are there any other external DVD burners for recommendations? I find the laptop drives very unreliable. Like my 8x DVD rewriter on my laptop doesn't read what it just burnt.

Grev,

The portable drives we're talking about are all built around a laptop DVD burner. So reliability would be an issue, just as it was with my CD burner. Getting a desktop-sized DVD drive and making it battery powered would be a bit of an operation, because they're big and not very power efficient. Here's some power consumption numbers, so if we say 20W for the burn, which takes about 20 minutes at 16x including verifying and assuming 80% efficiency in the conversion you'd need about 10WH per disk. Which means that a high current version of the battery in a DSLR would get you one disk, but because the high current versions of those batteries are insanely expensive and only rated for 200-500 cycles it's probably better to plan on using 10xAA or 12xAA NIMH pack delivering 2000mAH[1] (total 24 or 29WH) which should get you two, maybe three disks. You could easily fit those in a standard external case. You could also fit a card reader, but only with a custom built case (ie, manufactured rather than home built).

But that's a big chunky lump of junk if you're travelling, and an expensive toy if you're not. Those external 5" drive bays are big and heavy, probably 2kg or more and you wouldn't fit one in most people's camera bags or in the accessory comparment of a laptop bag.

Moz
[1] delivering as opposed to claiming. I'm working up a test rig to measure actual battery capacity at the rate of discharge my flash demands, but it's harder than it sounds. Mostly because the flash draws more current than I can easily measure, my first attempt produced noticeably slow flash cycle times (and peak current around 4A). But anyway, at 2A I only have one brand that's holding its rated capacity and that's the fast discharge cells from the model aircraft guys.

I would never trust a single portable hard disk - if you're going to take that tack make sure you take two and copy the photos to both. It might take a little more effort/time, but what happens if one is lost/broken/stolen?

I took a different option for a recent trip to Peru. Rather than taking my normal notebook I bought a Sony Vaio UX-17 - a notebook about the size of a paperback novel, and weighing in at just over 500 grams.

All photos were copied onto the notebook, and then from there onto an external USB harddrive that was kept seperate to the notebook itself.

All in all it was an excellent travelling companion. For more details, see my blog entry Travelling like a Geek

Thanks for the info. I just really don't like the incompatibility of the built in laptop drives, much prefer using a few memory cards and portable harddrives and ipods to decrease risks until I get to a desktop burner.

I like the idea of the UX-17.... Pity it is a Sony.

Combine one of these with a couple of (or more) portable HDDs (which IMO offer the best storage bang for the buck) and it is possible to have the best of everything.

Cheers

moz wrote:I'm working up a test rig to measure actual battery capacity at the rate of discharge my flash demands, but it's harder than it sounds.

Moz,

This is slightly off-topic for this particular thread, but I think it has relevance both here, as well as in this thread.

Look at the Quantum unit referred to in the other thread, and then also consider the shoulder packs that the Metz 6 uses. What sort corcuitry woud be needed to build a battery pack that uses a 6V gel cell, to enable it to be recharged? I'm thinking in terms of gelcel with twin outputs, to power .... whatever ... from a shoulder pack.

You'd need to be able to recharge the cell in situ, and monitor that process, and probably isolate and protect each of the outputs to ensure device safety. What else?

What do you think?

gstark wrote:What sort corcuitry woud be needed to build a battery pack that uses a 6V gel cell, to enable it to be recharged? I'm thinking in terms of gelcel with twin outputs, to power .... whatever ... from a shoulder pack.

As usual DaveB is one step ahead of both of us... http://burren.cx/photo/flash_power.html