EPSON P-2000 DIGITAL PHOTO STORAGE
The Epson P-2000 may be the first truly practical and well-designed compact photo storage/viewer unit for photographer's on the go. As an added bonus, it supports movie and audio files.
It doesn't take long to fill up large flash cards on a long photo excursion. A laptop can be used to download memory cards, but even the smallest laptops take up too much space to carry "out in the field". My usual practice is to carry several 1 GB cards with me and download them to a laptop at night (and burn backups to CD-R discs).
Now it is possible to carry your portable hard drive and image viewer on your belt and download memory cards whenever you want. Previous portable units all had weaknesses of one sort or another. It looks like Epson is the first to get it right.
The Epson P-2000 is a 40 GB storage unit and viewer with a 3.8 inch color screen. The unit only measures 5.8 x 3.3 x 1.2 inches in size. It can download thirteen (13) 1 GB memory cards on one charge. That is a lot!
Just to keep this in perspective, on a two week trip to Tahiti, I shot 13.8 GB worth of photos. That is a total of 5,400 photos in jpeg/fine mode on a 6 megapixel Canon 10D camera. The Epson P-2000 would download almost all of those photos on one battery charge. The 40 GB capacity of the P-2000 means it would hold almost three times as many photos as I took on the entire Tahiti trip.
Charge the battery in the P-2000, put it on your belt, and set out with your camera gear and two memory cards. When one card card is full, put it into the P-2000 to download while you continue shooting with the other card. Alternate the memory cards and you can continue shooting this way all day long (unless you exceed 13 GB, then you will need to recharge the P-2000).
You can review jpeg files and some RAW files (Nikon NEF, Canon CRW and CR2, and Epson R-D1) on the 3.8 inch screen. It will store other kinds of RAW files but you can't view all of them.
It is still a good idea to download the files from the P-2000 to your laptop at night via the USB 2.0 connection on the P-2000.
The Epson P-2000 will store other kinds of files and supports several kinds of movie and audio files (including AVI, MOV, mpeg, m-jpeg, AP4, ASF, MP3, and AAC files).
Two good reviews are at
DP Review and
Luminous Landscape.
Total cost is around $500 (USD).
