Storing Pictures While Backpack Travelling?

Amgine007 asks: "A friend of mine will be leaving in January 2004 for a 12-to-18-month 'around the world' trip. He's pretty technically saavy, but not really much of a computer-and-gadgets geek. He has an interesting problem: How do you live out of a backpack for a year (or more) and manage to take and save a lot of digital pictures (say 10,000), if you will have very few connections to the outside world -- few sources of power (at the odd hostel or train station outlet), no internet, and no USB?"

"He hasn't yet purchased a digital camera, so any camera or convergence device to be available in the next 6 months is fair game.

We've thought of a few scenarios. Bringing along a ton of CF cards is neither cheap nor reliable -- suppose the media gets lost or damaged. An ideal solution might involve being able to mail media home, while still having a copy 'on the road' in case that media gets lost in the mail.

And isn't it about time we see consumer devices with support for firewire drives, such as the iPod? I envision a digital camera that can talk (and backup) to an iPod -- this would be more than enough storage in a 15gb model, and small enough to take backpacking painlessly. However, the new models feature a proprietary dock connector, which makes one the iPod's old great advantages -- charge from any firewire port! -- a thing of the past.

A camera that burns images to a CD would be nice, but only if the CD was secondary storage -- ie, save pictures to internal buffer, burn to N CDs, erase internal buffer. This would allow the easy creation of duplicates, but might require a lot of CDs.

How would you plan your gadgets, given 6 more months of advancement of new technology (and price-cuts on old tech)? There's a whole lot of neat camera-ready devices coming about about now, so there could be quite a few creative ideas. Winning solution is the simplest and most portable."

Comments

Media durability..

[Myself]

I've long been a fan of CF, because of its high capacities and universality, which drives cost down. However, its is bulky compared to the other standards, and the multipin connector is expensive.

My most recent camera is SmartMedia (SSFDC) based, and I'm happy with it. The neat thing about the cards is that they're flat. I can tuck one into my cheek to conceal it, slobber all over it "I don't know what you're talking about officer", wipe it off, put it back into the camera, and it works flawlessly.

Doing the same thing with a CF card would result in the contact holes becoming waterlogged, and requiring compressed air to blast them out. By the way if you've never opened a CF card, grab one that you don't use any more (who needs all those 8mb starter cards that come with crappy cameras?) and rip it apart. They're pretty cool. I think I'll put photos up on my gallery, check the Tech album.

Anyway, CF's speed and size are great, but the connector is its downfall as a media format. (as an expansion slot, lots of pins are great!)