I have been researching how to store my digital photos while on two 21 day TT tours starting next month without taking a troublesome laptop, purchasing copious memory sticks, or hunting down camera shops while on tour. My answer is the purchase via the internet of a 30GB X-Drive II for $A320 which I have now tested and works admirably. It takes about 3 minutes to download a full 128MB card, will do about 40 downloads before recharging, and the li-ithon battery takes about 3hrs to charge. I can now take literally thousands of photos without worrying and leave the editing till later. I have a Sony F70 5.1 digital camera with 5 times optical zoom which I have been testing for the last six months and am rapt in the photos. I will be leaving my very good 35mm camera and cam corder at home.

Hi Peter Handy,

A 30GB X-Drive II, you'll be happy with your choice. I have a 20 GB X-Drive (I) and was very satisfied with it on our 11 day Real France tour (BB tour) in last April. I brought two 128 MB memory cards with me which turned out to be necessary. Sometimes I just didn't have time to download pictures so I could reuse the same memory card right away. Did my downloads either on the coach or in the hotel. Have a great trip!

Peter:
There was some discussion of the x-drive in the photography section of this board some time ago.

I use an x-drive with 20 gigs. Haven't been able to fill it yet with off loads from my Sony DSC-707 5 megapixel camera. I carry 4 128 meg memory sticks and off load them at night.

Shoot your photos at the highest resolution. You have plenty of room. See some of mine at:
http://www.pbase.com/gsrunyan/italy />
Glenn

Glenn,

Your photos are breathtaking!

Tammy

Where do you find the X-drive? How much do they cost? This sure sounds like what I need for when we go on our trip in the fall.

Hi 1906,

I bought mine online in last November. Paid about $170 for the bare system and a 20GB IBM laptop harddrive. The price may be different since then. Also, the manufacturer had upgraded the device early this year. I posted some info in another thread which may be useful to you. As Glenn suggested, you can find more info by doing a search on BB about X-Drive.

http://69.0.134.219/ttbb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=006059#000001

Good luck!

If you have a camera which uses CF cards (as most do), it might be worthwhile looking again at the price of memory cards; prices have fallen through the floor in the last six months. I have, for example, a 1GB CF card in my camera, and that's more than enough for even the most enthusiastic "snapping" on a tour. No need for additional storage devices with memory cards of that size!

Regards,

Chris

According to my usual memory card supplier (Expansys.com), biggest card sizes are currently:

CF: 3GB (if you're VERY rich!)
Memory Stick: 1GB
MMC: 128MB
SD: 512MB
SmartMedia: 128MB

But CF is far and away the cheapest card format (eg 1GB CF is �152; 1GB Memory Stick is �450).

Perhaps saying that _most_ cameras use CF is an exageration, but it appears to be the most common memory card format in the cameras I've personally encountered.

Regards,

Chris

I've got to say that I'm with Bob & Chris on this one. We just got back from a trip to Hawaii (on our own, not with a tour company). I decided to shot mainly digital this trip. Remembering the good words a number of folks had for the x-drive type solutions, I planned to get one. After doing some internet/newsgroup research, I changed my mind. I think it is a given that most users that have a bad experience with some sort of hardware will mention it on the internet while relatively few with good experiences say much. The negative views, IMO, generally don't represent the actual percentage of any problems that really exist. In this case though, I decided that I just couldn't take a chance. With an X-drive, all your eggs are in one basket. If it fails (and there a number of stories of failures to be found), you've just lost everything to that point. Maybe something could be recovered when you get home, but probably not. I just couldn't take that chance. I know that Glenn, tpc, and others have had no problems. That means a lot to me, but I've worked with computers for 20+ years and realize that nothing is guaranteed. I decided that the actual best solution would be to download to a laptop and burn CDs. That would give the redundancy of images on CDs and on a hard drive. Unfortunately, I don't have a laptop and can't afford one right now (especially just to keep up with pictures). Even that solution would suck if the laptop crapped out early on a trip. I just bit the bullet and bought a lot of memory cards. I found a deal on 512mb CF cards on eBay plus paid more normal prices for 256mb cards. I took 5 of the 512mb cards and 4 of the 256mb cards. I didn't use TIFF or RAW but instead used the best quality JPEG setting. That was more than enough for this trip as I only used 4+ of the big cards. I took two digital cameras (and a couple of small film cameras) and tried to use both digitals so that if a card went bad (and there are stories of bad cards out there too) I would still have some pictures of the places we visited. This worked fine for me. It might not be the best solution for someone else and might not be the best solution for me the next time I travel, but this time it did the trick.

Mike

Hi All, New to digital..how many pics will a 256MB card take...set on auto focus? Leaving on Friday and taking my new Canon AR70, my 35mm for backup and 3 throw aways - how's that for disaster planning given I am a beginner

There are two factors which determine picture size: resolution, and picture quality. The higher the resolution of the picture and the higher the quality, the larger will be the resulting file.

I'd be astonished if your camera's instruction manual didn't tell you how many picture you can fit onto a given size card for the various combinations of size and quality. Have you looked?

As an example, however, I have a number of digital cameras, but the one I use most often is a little 3.1MPixel Canon Digital Ixus V3. I generally use this at its maximum resolution of 2048x1536, with the medium of its three quality settings. This combination results in pictures which are about 700k in size, so you'd fit about:

256x1024/700 = 374

pictures onto a 256MB memory card.

You'll see now why I said that a 1GB memory card is more than enough for any tour - it'll hold 4x the number of pictures of a 256MB card, or about 1500 pictures!

Regards,

Chris

My camera is a Sony and takes a memory stick which costs 70.00 for 128 megs. I found a 15GB
X-Drive 11 for 189.00 on the internet which I think would make sense rather than buy some new memory sticks. I ordered it so hope I am not sorry.

Hi Chris, thanks for the example. It helped a lot. My manual probably has it stated somewhere but for the moment didn't have active recall.

Hi rmmontuori, thanks for the website-it's great and I printed out the chart to keep. Your explanation helps a lot too.

As you both can see (or maybe not) I'm rather intimidated by all the details and will have to grow into digital gradually.

I intend to have the CF card dumped onto a cd. Once this happens, am I correct in believing that the CF card is free of pics and ready for another round of shooting till is full again? See how green I am!

Also....I intend to put the camera loaded into my carryon and put it through the scanners. I have never had film fried so since a digital has no film I assume it's safe...Do CF cards get fried?

Thanks again

Hi rmontouri, Bob that's exactly what I was thinking "blank" Oh how goofy am I?! I will be the BB's current test case on Friday as to whether CFCs fry or not, and revert with results when I return at the end of the month. Thanks again for your help and good wishes.