Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Luminous Landscapes just did a review of the Epson P-2000 Picture Viewer and it seems to be a real winner. I’ve been covering the P-2000 since we first started hearing about it a couple months back because it’s been one of those devices that I think has some real promise in appealing to a broader cross-section of users.

Epson’s main business is in printing and imaging, and so it’s pretty predictable that such a device is geared toward the photographic industry – especially now that digital has taken over all but some of the higher end medium and large format ranges as well as the ultra-cheap instamatic and disposable end of the spectrum.

Ever since digital cameras came out, there’s been a continual effort at figuring out storage solutions. Various types of memory cards have served primarily, although Sony in particular has done a lot with more static optical media. But very early on, there were third-party companies (for some reason I never saw a camera company come out with one, although Nikon finally did just last month) selling devices that became known as “digital wallets.” There was an actual product name called “digital wallet” (you can still read a review of it on Steve’s Digicams), but like so many of these companies, they eventually went out of business. Other such companies and products have come and gone, and some had real promise but for whatever reason could not get their product into mainstream consumer electronics retail outlets, and this lack of availability and lack of confidence in the staying power of the company motivated most photographers, amateur and professional alike, to switch to a solution that many of them have at their disposal anyway – a laptop. Certainly laptops are not as portable as these digital wallets are, but you can carry them around to most locations, or at least have them at your hotel room ready to dump image files onto from your memory cards at the end of each day.

So, why I believe that the P-2000 could shake things up here is for a few reasons. One is that Epson is a big, respected name brand. They are not some company that you’ve never heard of that only produces one product. Secondly, it looks like with the P-2000, they’ve gotten everything right. While it could be slightly smaller, the P-2000 has pretty much everything you would want in device for storing images, but more importantly it has capabilities that will appeal to non-photographers. It’s ability to play audio, but more importantly video files, makes it into a true “Portable Media Player” device.

There are a number of companies that are competing in the PMP market, including Archos, VTec, iRiver, Vosonic, Smartdisk, Creative, Nikon, etc. As you can see, most of these are not big names. Also, there seems to be a divide between the brands geared toward Photographers (Nikon, Vosonic, Smartdisk and others) which have the ability to read memory cards directly, and the ones geared more to the general user who wants to listen to music, LOOK at images, and watch video (all the others). It’s not very well known by the general populace that the photo-oriented PMP’s ALSO do a lot of what the non-oriened ones do – they will play many audio and video formats in addition to being a temporary or permanent storage hold for your digital images. It’s unfortunate that these players aren’t being marketed more broadly (I’ve never seen them in a Best Buy or Circuit City for example). Part of the issue may be their relatively larger size than many of the non-photo-oriented PMP’s, but I still think that small amount of additional size is made up for in terms of their utility as a great supplement to the increasingly ubiquitous digital camera. Until most digital camera’s start coming with their own large hard drive’s built in instead of memory cards, the photo-oriented features are only going to increase in value.

The P-2000, it seems, is following many of these other photo-oriented PMP’s in that it is being marketed mainly to photographers and not as a general consumer electronics device. Maybe the quality of the product and the Epson name will finally create a standard bearer in this product category, like the iPod is with MP3 players, but I would have liked it if Epson would have marketed it to everyone, because it really has just as much appeal as any of those other PMP’s, plus the added value to people who take a lot of digital photos. Maybe Epson would rather be the big fish in a little pond, but I for one think they are selling themselves short.

You hear about “convergence” a lot these days, but I think it’s one of those over-hyped concepts which because of that loses some of its meaning. When people talk about convergence, they are talking about creating devices that serve multiple purposes. So far the big ones out there in my mind are smartphones that have the functions of a PDA, a phone, and an internet device, among others, but also PMP’s, which can play music, videos, show pictures, or just serve as portable hard drive. Why does this have an allure? Well, there’s the obvious issue of portability. No one wants to have to carry a whole bag of gadgets with them wherever they go, or for that matter put a device in all your pants and jacket pockets. The other issue is convenience. Why not have your PDA with all your contacts in the same casing as your phone so that you can call anyone or email them without having to go look on your computer or another portable device? Or for that matter take pictures and email them with the same device? Yet another issue but one that’s maybe not discussed as much is price. It really does help when you can fit a bunch of products into one, even it costs $500. If you tried to buy these things separately you could easily go over this price, but companies know that they can only go so high even with this kind of device before people will simply balk because they don’t want to spend such a large chunk of cash on something they will be taking everywhere with them (and consequently will be more at risk for breakage or being stolen). As technology improves, such devices will only start converging more and these individual product categories will go away. You’ll have an all-in-one device, but it may not even need to have a “cell phone” within, but rather a software application that can allow for audible communication over the Internet ala Voice Over IP. Cellular networks of the future will probably merge with wide-area internetworking hotspots that use technologies like Wimax or the even more advanced Mobile-Fi to provide a similar ubiquitous connection as current cellular networks do. We probably won’t see this for at least three or four years, but I’m convinced it will happen in less than ten years. Then, thankfully, we can just deal with one device category and no niche markets per se. You won’t have to go to one type of store to buy a device that has one feature and to another for another. Some will say that having devices dedicated to a single purpose allows for that device to perfect functionality, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. The problem is that this is a tradeoff that most people have decided is worth having if they can save a lot of money and space and have something that meets 98% of their needs and does so with a quality level that for most is perfectly fine. The “snobs” or “philes” or whatever you might call them may still go for the component design that perfects the experience at large financial cost, but as with current audio and video markets, these users will be a small minority.

I just got some additional info from Epson about the P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer (AKA PhotoFine). I’ve written before about the P-2000, which to me looks like one of the best Personal Media Players out there because it not only caters to the general consumer, but to the high-end amateur, or even professional photographer. Here are a few new things that I hadn’t seen before:

• Ultra fine high precision processing for close positioning and alignment of pixels, thereby increasing pixel count to 256 per square inch for better resolution and detail (I can only imagine this will look very nice, and viewing a dvd video capture at full resolution on such a small screen should be quite impressive!)

• View images from memory card without downloading to the hard drive (I can see this being useful for some digital photographers. For example, say you don’t have the time to transfer all your images, but just want a quick way to view them (and show others) on the road. Instead of compromising your camera’s battery by having them view the images on the camera, simply transfer the memory card over to the P-2000 and view them on a much larger screen)

• NTSC or PAL (this is a nice feature so that one can hook the P-2000 up to TV’s and not have to worry about the compatibility with different TV signal standards in different parts of the world)

• Speaker: Dynamic (symbol) 28 x 1 (Mono) (I’m not really sure what this means except that maybe the P-2000 has a mono speaker on it, presumably for listening to sound files or the audio that accompanies the video files. While Stereo would have been better, it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference coming out of a small speaker. Let’s face it, most of the time, you would probably use headphones for this purpose, but it’s nice to know that you can actually share the audio without having to go out and buy accessories like a portable speaker system.)

• 5.8” x 3.3” x 1.2” in. (W x H x D) Weight: 415 g or 1 lb. with battery (So, here we can finally compare it to other players. Let’s use the iPod Photo as an example. The iPod Photo measures 4.1 x 2.4 x .75 and weighs 6.4 oz. So, we’re talking about something almost twice as thick, almost 50% wider, and almost 50% longer. This isn’t a big shocker to me, because around 2/3 of the real-estate on the front is the screen. The screen measures 3.8 inches on the diagonal. Compare that to half that – 2 inches – for the iPod Photo, which takes up only about ¼ of the front. You also get 640 x 480 pixels, almost ten times the number of pixels as the 220 x 176 on the Photo iPod. So yes, it’s not going to fit nearly as well in your pocket as an iPod, and at twice the weight it will weight you down a bit more, but if your priority is actually viewing images on the device and not just using it as a portable hard drive or something to plug into a larger display like a TV, there’s just no question about which is the superior device).

This product category seems to be getting more and more filled with new devices, and I’ll be trying to cover some of the others as they emerge as well. I would love to do a hands on review of the P-2000, but unfortunately I’m still not mass-market enough for companies to be sending me loaners units and I don’t have lots of disposable income lying around to buy new gadgets left and right. I’ll have to see how much access I can get to some of these devices at a local retail establishment and take a few furtive pictures with my camera phone!

Well, finally all the rumors of an iPod with a color screen for viewing photos have actually amounted to something. Today, Apple announced a new iPod called iPod Photo. It’s a bit more expensive than the standard iPod at $500 for a 40GB model ($100 more than the standard 40GB model), and $600 for a 60GB version.

The most detailed page about the iPod Photo that I’ve found so far indicates that it will display Tiff, PNG, JPEG, GIF, and BMP, but no RAW. You will be able to output images to a TV via S-Video or Composite connections, and there is an improved 15-hour battery life, the color screen, of course. In addition to being able to synch your images with a new version of iTunes released today, it will also let you sync album art for your music (and maybe audio book?) titles. The screen will be 220 by 176 pixels at 65,000 colors. This is not terrible, but still pretty small compared to other photo viewers, or even some mobile phones like the upcoming Treo 650.

I actually upgraded to a 40GB 4G iPod just a couple of months ago, so it’s a little annoying that if I had just waited a little bit longer, I could have saved up an additional $100 and gotten the added capability over what I have. So pardon me if what follows sounds a bit grumpy.

While progress is always good, I can’t help but think that Apple has really been taking advantage of the fact that they control a huge chunk of the market to make this progress really slow. We’ve had for quite some time now other products that have given larger screens with higher resolution, plus the ability to watch video in addition to just viewing individual pictures. The iPod Photo will not allow for direct loading via memory cards, rather one will have to use an accessory like the Belkin Media Reader at added expense and with a fairly slow transfer rate. Neither will you be able to play RAW digital photo files. Although the last two features might only appeal to digital photography enthusiasts, the fact that no video file format is going to be supported, not even Apple’s own Quicktime, is I think a universally understood disadvantage. Why did it take about four years for Apple to get a color screen to view images? Maybe by 2008 they will have an iPod Video! I don’t want to sound like a naysayer, but I am just dying for some major company like Sony, or even a well-known name like Epson to provide us with a device that not only does a whole lot more, but is actually designed as nicely as the iPod is. This might just provide some decent competition for the iPod which it currently does not have. And that’s why Apple can take it’s own sweet time introducing features that have been on other devices for years!

Thanks Gizmodo, for the heads up!

When I first heard about the new Epson P-2000, I thought it would be the perfect convergence media device. It has a hard drive and plays a bunch of different audio and video formats, and, given Epson’s reputation in the photographic print business, it provides some features not seen on other such devices, like ports for different memory sizes and support for numerous digital photo RAW file formats. With its huge 3.8” LCD and profusion of features, I suspected it would be at least as much as its predecessor, the P-1000, but Epson has actually dropped the price to $500! And it will be out next month here in the U.S.! Considering it has a 40GB hard drive, the same as the iPod’s current top-of-the line, plus has a huge amount of additional functionality, I can’t see why someone would pick the iPod instead.

Oh I suppose there is the user interface to consider. It’s hard to beat Apple in that area. But the UI on the P-2000 would have to be mighty clunky to opt for an iPod. Also, what about Apple’s online digital music store iTunes? For those who have downloaded a bunch of songs or hope to in the future, will this device be able to? It’s unclear. It is supposed to support AAC files, which is the format Apple uses with iTunes, but it’s not clear if that automatically means it can support iTunes specific DRM. I’m sure Apple controls which devices can and can’t access their DRM’d files and so far there’s been no mention from any camp. There is one more issue which probably is not a big one for most but is for me, and that is that I use the iPod primarily to listen to audio books that I download from Audible.com. These also have a proprietary DRM and while they can be played on an iPod, that also doesn’t mean by extension that they can be played by any device that can play an AAC file. I’ve been attempting to get answers to these questions from the various parties and I will post any information as soon as I get it.

Link to Gizmodo

Well, maybe I should say “less expensive” huh? The Fuji S3 Pro, Fuji’s top-of-the-line digital SLR announced last month and due to come out in November, is apparently going to be priced at $2,499. This is at least $500 cheaper than earlier estimates and almost half of the $4,000 that original rumors had said. With this kind of price tag, I think it will be even more irresistible to budget-conscious pros or even some amateurs who have a little more pocket change. The big difference that it will have even over the most recently announced Nikon D2X DSLR and Canon EOS 1DS Mark II, other than the vastly lower price tag, will be the newly designed sensor which according to Fuji expands the dynamic range of the images to be closer to film. (Briefly “dynamic range” relatest to how large a range of levels one has between black and white - the more levels, or the larger the range, the more ability to capture scenes with lots of contrast without either under or overexposing the picture) While it may not be as capable in other areas, like continuous shot speed, battery options, even sensor size and megapixels, this increased dynamic range could make it a must have even for Nikon afficianados (it takes Nikon lenses) who want to replace their backup film cameras and use it as a complement to their D2H or D2X. Unfortunately my wife reads my blog and I just know that this entry is going to have her wanting to start working a second job so that she can buy one of these (she has the current Fuji S2)!

Link to Photography Blog

Vosonic, a British company that’s been making portable hard drive solutions for digital photographers for a while now, recently introduced a couple of devices that are seeking, like the Epson P-2000, to converge the photography-oriented device with a more general-consumer Portable Media Player (PMP) device.

The MMV VP6300 comes with a 20GB hard drive, lets you play MP3’s, WMA’s, Mpeg-1, and Motion Jpeg on its 2-inch color LCD. It looks a whole lot like an iPod to me, and I think the only reason why this device is still being displayed on Vosonic’s page is that it’s not yet sold officially in the U.S., and so Apple probably can’t bully them legally over the pond quite as quickly and effectively. The device also takes most memory formats, you can plug it to your TV to watch/listen to its content, and even has a remote control. Sadly, it seems not to have any U.S. distributors, so if you live in the U.S. you will have to buy it either directly from Vosonic (if that’s even possible), or more likely through third unofficial parties through eBay.

The XS-DRIVE Super VP6210 comes in various sizes ranging from 20GB up to a whopping 80GB, but is a bit larger than the MMV VP6300. Its LCD, while it looks smaller, is only smaller in comparison to the larger size of the unit as a whole – it is the same 2 inches as the VP6300. In addition to the formats of the VP6300, the XS-Drive also plays AVI, and “MOD” which I think may be a typo meaning “MOV” or QuickTime. Everything else looks to be about the same as the VP6300.

The one problem I see for both of these is that they apparently can only show Jpeg images. This will be fine for the vast majority of folks, but for the serious photographer who takes images in RAW format, at least part of the time, it’s a serious limitation. The other issue I see is that for those who want to buy albums on Apple’s iTunes music store, these devices don’t support the AAC format like the Epson P-200. Then again, they do support WMA, which is Microsoft’s format that has DRM (copy protection scheme), so when MS’s music store gets off the ground, there will be an alternative. While these are pretty nice-looking devices, the much larger screen of the P-2000 and its support for RAW format files so far for me still give it the edge. And of course the fact that it comes from a large, well-respected company like Epson and is being officially sold in the U.S. through the normal distribution channels. These devices could be spectacular, but I, and I’m sure a lot of other people, would feel nervous about buying something from a relatively small, little-known company. What kind of support is going to be available if a unit I buy stops working? Will I have to send it overseas and wait weeks before I get a replacement or the unit fixed?

Last weekend me and my wife were in and around St. Michaels, MD for our first anniversary. Being avid shutter bugs, of course, we took a lot of gear with us and I got a chance to get a real working out of my new Nikon D70 digital SLR. Here are a few selected images, but if you want to see more, check them out on my Smugmug account.

Now, the one qualification that I should mention is that none of these have undergone any “post-processing” (editing to make them look better), other than converting them to jpegs from their original RAW format with Breezebrowser, which also does some noise reduction in the process.

This brings me to something I’ve mentioned on the D70 Yahoo! Group recently. Basically, I’m the type of person who likes to procrastinate. I have another tendency towards perfectionism in some things (certainly not everything!), so when mixed they can often cause lots of delay. This is the case when it comes to taking pictures with the D70. I know a fair degree about photography, but this is my first digital SLR. So I had to read the manual from cover to cover, and then got Thom Hogan’s Excellent eBook and read that as well. Then I started in on Deke McLelland’s Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One, which I’m about ¾ of the way done reading. Next is Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop CS for Digital Photographers, which I’ve heard great things about, and finally Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS. I could probably buy another 100 books on Adobe Photoshop and photography, but at least for now I wanted to get through as much of that stuff before taking lots of pictures. I have this fear that I will take lots of pictures which will add to my growing collection of stuff that I still have yet to do any post-processing on because I don’t feel I know how best to make an image look its best – more on this below. Luckily I was able to put that aside over the weekend and took over a hundred shots. Still nothing huge compared to many, but not bad considering I don’t normally take tons of shots of the same thing the way a lot of people do.

As I’ve been going through Deke’s book, I’ve learned a lot about various tools and methods in Photoshop, but the one thing that’s nagged me the whole time is that I never got a sense of why I was doing certain things, and then it hit me! I am, as I may have mentioned here before, color blind. There are various types of color-blindness and I don’t have the very rare type where you can’t see any color. I have the much more common type (apparently 10% of men have this) where one set of the color-recepter “cones” in my eyes are not as sensitive to their given wavelength of light that they are supposed to be. Like with monitors and image sensors in digital cameras, humans have receptors for the red, green, and blue components of light. Apparently either my red or green cones (or perhaps both) aren’t quite up to the job. This doesn’t mean I don’t see colors, but it’s harder for me to tell the difference between certain reds and greens. A blue that might have a little red in it, making it violet, I will see as just blue. This also means that certain colors that have read and/or green may look darker to me than they would to someone else.

It’s all very interesting, but I was hoping that it would not mean that I couldn’t effectively work with Photoshop, since I’ve found it a really fun learning experience, and it would be great to take images that don’t look all that great in their original form and really make them into something stunning. I was sent to this site that had a Photoshop plug-in, but apparently it was only to show a normal person how something might look to a color-blind person. I needed the opposite, but such a plug-in has not been created yet, although they do have web applications that emulate it. Even so, I began to wondering how it would work. Color is such a subjective thing to begin with. If I get something that allows me to see with “normal” vision, won’t it look “wrong” to me? When I make corrections, won’t some of them be to make the image look more like what it does when I view it in real life, in which case I will actually be making it look wrong for those with normal vision? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work on it without filters? Then again, if a green to me looks dark to me because my eyes aren’t picking up the light, and I push the brightness up in order to make it more visible, it will probably look positively radioactive for a person with normal sight!

Maybe there just is no way to get around it except for some future implanted video filtering system that would pump up red and/or green light in my optic nerve enough to compensate. But I can’t even contemplate laser surgery for near-sightedness, let alone something more invasive. Maybe they will build something into glasses or contacts that will eliminate color-blindness. But then it’s a matter of rewiring the brain to accept the new information as normal. I just wonder if the brain, not seeing what it’s used to, will actually change my perception of the colors in order to make them look more normal. I remember hearing back in high school about how the eye actually sees things upside down but the brain turns it right side up in order to make more sense of it. They apparently did experiments where they gave people glasses with lenses that turned things upside down again and after living with these glasses on day and night for an extended period, their brains again rewired in order to make their vision right-side up. Then when they removed the glasses, the normal vision of the people was upside down! Until of course their brains had time to rewire themselves yet again. It’s enough to give you headache thinking about this stuff!

Previously I mentioned a new Epson photo viewer slash personal media player (PMP) called the Photo Fine Player P-2000. The device has finally been officially announced, but I cannot find anything on Epson’s site or anywhere besides PhotographyBlog. It looks like most of the previous rumors were accurate. Additionally it has a pretty large 3.8 screen that can display images in VGA (640×480) resolution. Still no word on the AAC format and whether it could conceivably support Apple’s iTunes store for music purchases, or even Audible.com .aa format audio book files, but that does bring us to a relates story.

There have been rumors over the past few years about Apple coming out with a new iPod with a color screen that can display photos as well as do all the other iPod stuff. Well, it seems as if this rumor has popped up again and the sites commenting about it seem somewhat convinced that it is likely to be true. The new iPod is rumored to have a 60GB hard drive (which is supposed to hold upwards of 20,000 songs or 25,000 images), and a color screen that is the same size as current iPod screens. If this proves to be true, I’m glad that Apple is finally getting into the PMP market, since it will just add to overall competition that is good for consumers.

According to the rumor, the new iPod has something that most PMP’s don’t, the ability to take memory cards. The article lists “memory stick slots.” What I take this to mean is that it has more than one memory card slot. I think the author was using “memory stick” to mean the general memory card rather than what memory sticks are – the specific format that only Sony devices use. Otherwise, the usefulness of the slot would be relegated to Sony digital cameras, no doubt a sizeable chunk of the digicam market, but still a minority of that market as a whole. No word on the iPod being able to play video formats. If it did, my guess is that it would probably only support Quicktime video, another Apple format.

The rumors about the new iPod make it out to be more of a way to view pictures, but with the screen being pretty small, its more likely to be something that you hook up to a TV at a friend’s house rather than doing a lot of viewing on the device itself. The P-2000 on the other hand seems to be trying to merge the more consumer-oriented PMP market with one that might be more geared to serious photographers. Although prices for memory cards have been sliding at an ever-faster rate, the higher-capacity cards (2GB and up) are still pretty pricey, especially if you compare them to the capacities of these PMP’s of 20GB to now possibly 60GB. With file sizes increasing due to higher resolution capabilities and some people using RAW formats that take up more space than jpeg, cards can get filled up pretty quickly. This is especially true when you’re on travel, or filming a big event like a wedding. You can always take a laptop with you to dump your pictures onto the hard drive so that you can reuse the card for taking more pictures, but laptops aren’t nearly as portable as something the size of a PMP, and are usually a lot more expensive. But add the capacity of direct print, being able to view multiple RAW format files, and you can see that the P-2000 is geared a bit more toward the photographer rather than the general consumer. But the P-2000 also has MPEG-4, MP3, and AAC support, so it’s certainly attractive to the general consumer as well.

Of course, we don’t really know enough about the new iPod - even if it exists! – to say whether it how well or poorly it will compete, but I’m sure it will do well if for no other reason than it is an iPod. The large userbase of those who are familiar with the platform will motivate a lot of sales, in addition to it inevitably synching with iPhoto, a very popular image-cataloging program for Macs. Simply the Apple name will probably give it a lot of clout, as there are few big names in the PMP arena. Sure Epson is a big name in printers, but not in other consumer electronics. Archos is well known among those who follow the portable music or media markets, but that’s it. So many people may use the respected brand name of Apple to finally get into this product category.

Last week, a user on Treocentral.com posted a bunch of new Treo 650 pictures. Yesterday, the folks at MyTreo.net cleaned and resized these images and posted commentary. Basically educated guesses at the clues provided in the picture. Some of these guesses are helpful, but of course they are still just guesses. We’ll have to wait another week or two, perhaps a little longer, till the 650 is actually announced. Of course no one will be able to actually buy one for a while longer than that, but at least we will know with certainty what will be offered. It does look like the 650 will carry the newer version of Blazer, PalmOne’s web browser which they recently announced will be coming out for newer devices (no word on whether current devices will be able to take advantage and load this newer version). It also just dawned on me that this phone will have a 1.3-Megapixel camera. This may seem pretty lame compared to the 8-Megapixel prosumer cameras on the market today, not to mention the 12-16-MP high-end digital SLR’s or 22-MP Medium Format backs. But my first digital camera from four years ago, a Sony DSC-S30, had the same resolution. While the pictures can’t really be printed at more than a 4×6 without starting to look very obviously a digital print, on a computer screen, they look quite good! Of course, the camera had a nice Carl Zeiss lens, so I’m a bit concerned that despite the new Treo’s added resolution, image quality may still suck a bit. Then again, the pictures of the camera in action do look promising…

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…