Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Ok, maybe this isn’t exactly a PMP, but it’s definitely worth a look. Sandisk has just announced a device they are calling “Photo Album” that will serve multiple purposes, such as being a standard memory card reader, an MP3 player (MP3 being the only audio format it supports), and a “photo album.” It also plays Mpeg-1 files, but no MPEG-4. It’s an interesting idea, but one that probably still needs a bit of work. For one, there is no internal memory, so in order to play anything, one has to save it onto a memory card first, then insert it into the device. Not a big deal if you have a digital camera and can just take the card you’ve been using in the camera and plug it in, but what if you want to listen to MP3’s too? In other words you are faced with the dilemma that in order to use the device for multiple purposes you really should buy multiple memory cards. Yes, it’s possible to store photos and MP3’s on the same card, but I’d rather keep things separate. Memory prices are going down, so you could buy a couple of 1GB cards for under $100 each and put 300 or more songs on one and a similar number of high-res images on another. Or, if you resize and compress your images a bit, you could fit 3,000 or more on the same card. The one problem with viewing pictures on it is that it doesn’t have a screen! That’s right! The idea is you plug it into any TV and watch the pictures on that. Due to the need for a TV (or computer) and the size being a little bit bulky (not huge but not really something you could easily fit in your pocket), I wouldn’t really call this a portable solution. The other downside when it comes to viewing pictures is that it only displays jpegs. That’s fine for most consumers, but for more serious amateurs or professionals, the ability to view raw format files is pretty important. Luckily, my current camera has the ability to produce a highly-compressed jpeg image in addition to the main raw format file, but then again my camera, like most digicams that have come out over the last 4 years (maybe all?), it has a video cable that will let you connect it to a TV, thus negating the need for a separate device for doing this. The nice thing about this device is that it is fairly inexpensive at $50, so one could think of it as simply as a card reader with some extra functionality tacked on that could be very useful. But unless I’m in the market for a new card reader and this is discounted to no more than $20 more than a plain card reader, I’m probably not going to even consider it…