So my old photo bank (nachus) started to give me errors and be a general pain in the butt. That's completely unacceptable behavior for photo gear.
So I started looking around for some different photobank type toys.
I found three main stages: 1GB in 14 minutes, 1GB in 6 minutes and 1GB in 3 minutes. (tested with a CF card with multiple different sizes of files including one large 700MB .avi and a gig and a half of RAW files from me 30D)
Nachus belongs to the old style. 1 GB in 14 minutes... If it feels like it. I've seen 1gb in 25 minutes with that machine... beh.
There were a few machines purporting 3MB/sec in their system specs. That sounded cool to me. But then I saw the 5MB/sec variants.
So I asked around at 15 different shops or so (in the technology night market) and they all seemed to feel that the fastest was the Digimate III. Now they all told me that there were three different generations of the Digimate III. Some of them said that the first generation was the one with the physical press buttons, while the later two generations were the ones with the funky uhm under-the-plastic buttons on the front of the device, next to the LCD. yay. Like I care. Anyhow, they told me that the one with the old style buttons was likely to be less susceptible to taking damage, accidental presses or malfunctions. I didn't have anything to say otherwise, so I accepted this story. But the ultimate question was SPPEEEEEDDDD...
5.5MB/sec was the reported speed for a Digimate III in any incarnation, but one shop was busy trying to tell me that that was just what the book said and in fact, each different incarnation of the Digimate III was faster than the next. I sniffed and smelled BS. I had seen each of the different model's booklets and I knew that each different booklet, while very, very similar, did actually have minute changes here and there throughout that indicated to me that each version produced did undergo a Manual revision.
Other brands had similar booklets as well indicating to me that these things are all made in the same big huge plant in China... brand name is virtually irrelevant, EXCEPT that Digimate seems to have it's nose out in front. I wasn't able to find anything faster than that.
So I checked it and the speed that I came up with actually was a bit faster than what they reported. Perhaps this was due to the fact that I was using faster CF cards than they were using. They were using 150X SD and SDHC cards, but I still think that CF ought to theoretically surpass the typical speeds of SD (w AYYY more pins). (tested with an Apacer 100X 4GB "Photo Steno Pro" whatever that means... Seems fast enough.
Anyhow, I got almsot exactly 3 minutes for 1GB, sliding in at a cool 12 minutes for a full 4GB card.
I loaded the sucker up with a Western Digital Scorpion Drive at 120GB running at a passable 5400 RPM. So it's cooking right? Yum!
Anyhow one thing that they told me is that right now there are none of these devices ready for the market yet that support SATA. Now I thought this a bit odd, and seeing as the one guy had tried to feed me some BS earlier, I was skeptical. Asking around a few other places led me to believe that there may be a bit of a wait once these things sell out... And likely the stores will sell out of the fast ones, then have a bunch of slow ones that THE MANAGER doesn't have a clue about the difference and be unwilling to bring in new stock till the old 'crappy' stock sells out.
Additionally, I've also heard from a few places that standard IDE drives are going to be phased out soon. I found that the prices for SATA drives were still a bit higher than the IDE drives, so I seriously have no idea what's the deal there.
Anyways, point is, if you are thinking of buying one, do some asking around. See if you can test it out if it's a brand you don't know. If the book doesn't say 5+MB/s, it probably isn't. If it does say 5MB/sec, it's probably as fast as any other.
Oh and the 3 color OLED is HIGHLY readable in all lights and from virtually any angle if anyone wonders.
Just some random info for the masses! |
