.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Picture Porter 35, a portable hard drive/viewer for photographers
.AUTHOR Scott Koegler
.SUMMARY The Picture Porter 35 is essentially a portable destination for the images on your memory card.
.OTHER
Digital FOCI makes a decent variety of photography related products. In the past, I’ve looked at their digital photo frames, and I like the value and features they include. Last week, I took a look at the newest update of their Picture Porter 35. The unit has been around for some time, but just recently got a firmware refresh that adds some nice touches. Still, there are a few things about the unit I would like to see changed.
The Picture Porter 35 is essentially a portable hard drive that photographers can use as a repository for their photos, a destination for the images on your memory card. The main reasons for copying photos from memory cards to a portable drive are to maintain a backup of your precious images and to free up space on the memory cards used in the camera. But with a device like the Picture Porter, shown in Figure A, you can do quite a bit more than just save your pictures.
.FIGPAIR A Slightly larger than a 3×5 index card, the Picture Porter can store a lot of images.
The "35" in the name is the indication that there is a 3.5" LCD on the unit. The display allows you to view your images (of course), but it also displays the user interface to manage the device, and it can be used to display video clips — even full length movies. The unit is available in either 250GB or 500GB capacities, which means you can store a bunch of photos, and hours of video.
The Picture Porter will also store and play sound files; MP3, WMA, and AAC formats. As far as video capabilities, you can load up MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 video files, and from my testing, they show nicely on the display.
What all this means is that in addition to holding all your photos, the Picture Porter 35 is also an entertainment device, similar in some ways to an iPod or other brand.
.H1 It’s a photo storage device
But that’s where the comparison to portable media players ends. The Picture Porter is much larger than almost any iPod-ish unit, and for a reason. There’s a 2.5" hard drive inside the unit rather than flash memory. That’s one reason for the relatively low prices: $399 for the 250GB version and $499 for the 500GB. And the 3.5" LCD shows 320 x 240 pixels, making it good enough for casual viewing and verifying that your images actually did get copied, but forget about viewing in high def.
The most important part of the Picture Porter, at least for photographers, is its ability to accept a wide variety of media, copy the images from the media to its hard drive, and display those images on the LCD for verification and viewing, as shown in Figure B. These things it does very well and with ease and speed.
.FIGPAIR B You can preview a wide range of formats.
The list of acceptable media types includes all the current types:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET CompactFlash
.BULLET MultiMedia Card
.BULLET RS-MMC
.BULLET SD Card
.BULLET SDHC card
.BULLET miniSD
.BULLET Memory Stick
.BULLET MS PRO
.BULLET MS Duo
.BULLET xD-Picture card
.END_LIST
I tried SD, SDHC, and Compact Flash drives from a variety of cameras, and each of them was promptly recognized when I inserted them into their respective slots along the left side of the Picture Porter.
Aside from just wanting to test the different card configurations, I wanted to check that images from different cameras could be read and displayed. Any portable hard drive can copy a file, but not every one can properly display every image format. The standard formats like JPG, TIFF, and BMP should be fairly easy for any device, but serious photographers like to save their photos in RAW format.
Picture Porter purports to support RAW files, and I was able to test RAW files from Nikon and Canon. Images from both brands displayed properly. For those RAW files that included JPG previews, the Picture Porter displayed both.
Picture Porter has a dual-use USB 2.0 connector that can be used to read USB memory cards — in other words, the Picture Porter acts as the host device. It can also act as the client USB device to connect to your computer when you want to retrieve your photos for use on the computer. The device was able to switch between host and client based on what was connected to the USB cable. This was a convenient feature, but it’s also possible to use the menu to change function if that were necessary.
Some of the new features in the latest firmware release include the ability to incrementally back up (copy) new images from your memory cards. This makes it easy to pop in a card that hasn’t been erased before you started shooting again, and avoid ending up with duplicate images. The same goes for exporting from the Picture Porter to your computer.
You can also copy images directly from one memory card to another without needing to save the images to the Picture Porter first. Of course, this means copying between two different card types since you can’t put two cards in the same card slot at the same time.
Other firmware updates seem to be mostly usability enhancements that make viewing images and using other functions more convenient, and I’m sure they are welcomed improvements. Of course, previous versions of the Picture Porter can be updated to the current firmware level by downloading the update from Digital FOCI’s website.
What I don’t particluarly like about the Picture Porter is the control interface. It consists of one rocker switch and 4 buttons arranged along the right side of the unit. I imagine that after some experience using the combination, I would become accustomed to it, but it’s less than intuitive. At times, I just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. In this era of touch screen controls, I’d like to see the next update to Picture Porter include a touch screen UI. Of course that would require much more than a firmware update, but it should make it easier to use.
Overall I like the Picture Porter 35. Rechargable battery life is rated between 6 and 10 hours of use, but if you’re using it strictly as a backup device, is should last for weeks of use.
It’s nice to be able to use the unit as a video and audio player, since you’re carrying it with you anyhow, but it’s not something you’ll carry easily in your pocket… just too big.
But that isn’t what we should judge the Picture Porter 35 on. This is primarily a photo image backup/storage device. And in that role it really shines. Construction is solid, capacity is adequate, ease of backing up storage cards is good, and the display, though not hi-res, is adequate to make sure your files are backed up, and even to watch them as slide shows. If you travel with your digital camera and want to be certain all your images make it back safe, Picture Porter 35 is a device to consider.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn more about [[http://www.digitalfoci.com|Picture Porter 35]].
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Scott Koegler explores digital products and writes about them from his home in the foothills of North Carolina, and from his camper (as long as he has an internet connection. He has acted as CIO, editor, publisher, photographer, and wine taster, and enjoyed each role.
