Overall Performance

Here are the key performance questions: "How long is it going to take to download a card full of images" and "How long is it going to last in the field?".

Digital Album Download Timing

Timings below were performed using 128 MB (or maximum capacity of the card) of images and timed from the moment the "Copy" option was selected to the moment the display returned to the main menu. Each test was performed 3 times and speed calculated as an average.

*1 - 62 MB of images, *2 - 31 MB of images

Downloading transfer speeds for Compact Flash (Type I or II) are on a par with what we saw of Minds@Work's Digital Wallet, SmartMedia a little slower. At least the Digital Album works with Sony Memory Stick, the M@W Digital Wallet failed that test. These speeds are also about the same as PCMCIA transfer on a notebook / laptop.

Transfer speeds in Windows 2000 (USB)

After connecting the Digital Album to your PC Windows 2000 will detect it as a new mass storage device, point to the CD-ROM for the driver and installation is complete.

You can now access the Digital Album as another removable drive on your computer (the yuv and yuvb directories are created by the Digital Album to cache thumbnail and TV size images):

We tested the Digital Album to evaluate how long it would take to download your images once you get home (or back to your notebook). Tests performed using SiSoft Sandra 2001.

• Read: 0.75 MB/s
• Write: 0.90 MB/s
• Access time: 13 ms (approx.)

Thus it would take 22 minutes to download 1 GB of images from the Digital Album.

Digital Album Battery Life

We devised a simple download test, a Compact Flash Type I card with 128 MB of data was downloaded every 5 minutes until the Digital Album would no longer power up. On a full battery charge we managed 31 iterations of this routine which equated to 2 hours 35 minutes and a total of 3.9 GB of data. A relatively good performance for such a small battery pack.