USB Flash drives- Can digicams connect?

[PinHole]

I was just wondering if it is possible, with just a digicam and a USB flash drive (no computer, out in the field) and some sort of connector, to download the pictures from the camera and store them on the flash drive.

Anybody played around with this?

 

[PhotoOtaku]

I'm pretty sure no camera out there supports these. With USB flash drives costing around about the same as popular memory card formats per MB, how could this be useful? With the same money, you could get a second memory card for the camera, and just swap them out when you run out on the first one. For any kind of real portable storage for image files away from home are the small harddrive based storage devices. You can get an entry level device for around $200.00

I was just wondering if it is possible, with just a digicam and a
USB flash drive (no computer, out in the field) and some sort of
connector, to download the pictures from the camera and store them
on the flash drive.

Anybody played around with this?

 

[EJN]

I was just wondering if it is possible, with just a digicam and a
USB flash drive (no computer, out in the field) and some sort of
connector, to download the pictures from the camera and store them
on the flash drive.

Anybody played around with this?

I just don't see it possible at all. You've got no software, drivers or Explorer type intermediary with which to copy/paste from camera to even another card. Never delved into this external type thing like XsDrive or the like, but there is surely one about a modest 6Gig and modest price ...and THAT's equal to 6 x 512Meg CF's so must surely be the thing for this.
--
EJN

 

[Michael Meissner]

I was just wondering if it is possible, with just a digicam and a
USB flash drive (no computer, out in the field) and some sort of
connector, to download the pictures from the camera and store them
on the flash drive.

Anybody played around with this?

I'm not sure if I know what you are asking.

If you are asking whether there is a portable hard drive that can copy from your flash media to its disk, and has a LCD screen which you can view pictures, and later use as a removable disk drive, the Nixvue Vista might be appropriate:

http://www.nixvue.com/products/vista/index.html

If you have a TV set available you can plug the device into, such as in a hotel room at night or a portable unit, the Cinema Disk or the X's Drive Pro might do the trick:

http://www.deltrontech.com/Enclosure/CinemaDisk/cinemadisk.htm
http://www.vosonic.com.tw/index.php?php_mode=spec&php_itemid=20

If you would prefer to burn CD's instead of using a disk based unit, and want to display the pictures on a TV, the Apacer CP200 or the Roadstor might be appropriate:

http://www.jobodigital.com/products/disc_steno_cp200.htm
http://www.micro-solutions.com/product_info/roadstor/lit-401010.pdf

If you are asking if any camera can write to a USB flash drive with the camera as the master controller, I am not aware of any such device.

If you don't need to copy the media files but want to view them, a lot of PDA's have CF slots, and you can get other media types to CF converters, so you would be able to use the larger PDA screen to view pictures.

 

[PinHole]

I'm pretty sure no camera out there supports these. With USB flash
drives costing around about the same as popular memory card formats
per MB, how could this be useful?

I was just thinking if you had some laying around could you use them this way? I wouldn't buy one for this use.

But it looks like it wouldn't work. Too bad.

 

[David314]

I was just wondering if it is possible, with just a digicam and a
USB flash drive (no computer, out in the field) and some sort of
connector, to download the pictures from the camera and store them
on the flash drive.

I don't know of any but it is a good question and lets take this one more step.

Why don't any of the cameras talk directly to USB mass storage devices? They have the file system support already.

Imagine buying any USB mass storage device, say 250GByte drive and storing to it. Yes, i know there are all kinds of devices around that let you download into them and view them but they are relatively small in storage and expensive in price. You already have a screen.

And yes, there is a difference between USB slaves and masters, but most digicams can talk to printers so they can control both ways.

USB 2.0 download to USB mass storage devices would be a big step in the right direction. It could just put the file into a DCIM subdirectory using FAT32 file system.

So for less than $200 you could get 180GBytes of mass storage that would have a small form factor and you would hardly ever run out of space on that vacation . And yes, you could take a laptop but who wants the hassle?

some enterprising camera company could even market this thing themselves, say Canon or Olympus etc.

David

 

[PinHole]

Yes, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. It seems that the technology is right there and could easily be made to work, but I guess it has to be designed in to the camera software, and nobody thought of it or thought is was useful enough to write a little code for (or maybe they don't want you to use alternative storage if you might buy more of their brand of memory, which is a high-profit item).