JP/18/ZATNI2

Portable backup device for digital photos

Zatni Arbi Contributor/Jakarta

Imagine you are on a two-day mountain-climbing trip to a location famous for its exotic views.

Or a week-long trip to scenic West Sumatra. You have in your pocket a digital camera complete with two fully-charged, spare batteries. You have also bought a 2GB SD card.

How many pictures will you be able to take during that trip? If you take pictures in JPEG format, you may be able to store around 2,500 of them: Not bad.

What if you want to keep the pictures in RAW format as you want to work on them later with Adobe Photoshop? Your 2GB SD card will fill up very quickly, like Jakarta's Ciliwung River after an afternoon downpour.

Besides, SD cards are not cheap, so you are likely to think twice before investing in too many of them.

A few weeks ago, Wiyanto Kodrat, an old acquaintance, gave me a call. He said he had a USB "On-The-Go"-based portable hard disk that can copy files directly from a digital camera. It does not require a PC or a notebook, and it comes with a protective belt pouch.

It also runs on an internal battery. Wiyanto asked me whether I would be interested in trying it out. I said I would. It sounded like it was a solution for those who take thousands of high-resolution pictures with their digital cameras.

3PM B185 My Photo Manager

This hard disk, called 3PM B185 My Photo Manager, is made by Magnetox, another Taiwanese company. It was love at first sight when I saw the gadget's very sleek design. It contains a 1.8-inch hard disk with 20GB storage capacity (most notebooks still use the larger 2.5-inch hard disks).

It has both a USB port and a retractable USB cable. When it is used as a host, you just connect the digital camera to the device USB port. The cable will turn it into a peripheral.

There is a tiny power switch. To operate it as the host, all you have to do is press the four-way rocker button to get to the storage device, folder and file that you want to connect to, select it with the button in the center of the ring and press another button to start the copying or backup operation.

You can also delete files on digital cameras. So, if you have run out of space on your SD card, you can back up all the image files to 3PM B185, erase the files on the card to reclaim the memory space and then take more pictures. The OLED screen is quite readable, and the menu is simple and easy to understand.

You will have to use the retractable USB cable for connection to your notebook. The 3PM B185 will act as a peripheral, and therefore it can be controlled from the notebook. You will have an additional 20 GB of external storage at your disposal.

The device itself makes no noise whatsoever, except a loud beep each time it finishes a task. It does not get hot after extended operations. Charging will take around two hours. Unfortunately, I was unable to check how many backup operations you can do before the internal battery runs out of juice.

Backing up a full 2GB SD card will take quite some time, as it uses a USB 2.0 connection.

Downsides

I guess one of the downsides is the use of an internal battery: Once the battery has reached the end of its useful life, nothing can be done to save the entire gadget. On the other hand, that is also the case with most current PDAs and portable MP3 players.

I guess gadget makers still assume that, when the time comes for the internal battery to become completely dead, it will also be the time for you to move on to a more sophisticated device. At least, that is what they want us to do.

I was told that the hard disk is not user-replaceable, either, although you can find the 1.8-inch hard disk on the market. The electronics inside the 3PM B185 are so packed that you cannot pry it open and still hope to put everything together so that it works properly.

Not all digital cameras are compatible with it. Most models from Canon, Casio, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus and Sony will work well with it. During my test, it even worked with ModernPhoto's MPix camera.

You are advised to check its continuously updated compatibility list or, better still, try it out with your digital camera first before you cough up around USD 238.00 for it.

Even if your camera does not work directly with 3PM B185, you can still use a card reader. However, you will have to take out the SD card from your digital camera, plug the card reader into 3PM's USB port, plug the card into the card reader, and after the operation is completed insert the card back into its slot. It certainly does not sound as appealing as just having to plug the USB cable.

Small and practical

There are other portable, hard disk-based backup storage devices for your digital cameras on the market. In addition, you can easily find models that come with an LCD screen that allows you to preview the images.

Some, including Epson's Multimedia Storage Viewer, can even play back videos and music files. I like the 3PM B185 My Photo Manager because of its compact size and practicality. Besides, the LCD image and video viewer will only shorten the battery life significantly.

The 3PM B185 My Photo Manager is just one of the possible applications of the USB OTG standard. You can see that, pretty soon, there will be other tiny, self-powered portable hard disks that can be connected to your PDA, smartphone or CD-burner.

They could even connect to your car's MP3 player and supply more songs than you could possibly listen to during a trip through the whole of West Sumatra.