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Transfer Digital Pictures from Flashcard to CD?
chimpo13 writes "I'm riding a 40-year-old, Italian made 250cc motorcycle round the world and doing a journal with pictures (avoiding the 'blog' word). Small bike, not much room, and I'm doing this on the cheap. There is no laptop because you can't trickle charge one. I'm looking for a flashcard to CD burner so I can post digital pictures. I need reliability, battery power, and hopefully someone makes one with an option to 'save for web' to speed up uploads in Internet cafés. Unless someone else has a better idea. I leave from Sydney Australia in 4 months if anyone world wide wants to give me a tour of their town, email me."
Located here. Got good reviews from PC Magazine a few weeks back. I'd definitely trust this company...a good long history of good products
No upload to web, but may fit otherwise.
http://www.roadstor.com/
You can purchase the Belkin media reader accessory. It takes the pictures and transferes them to your iPod. You can get iPods up to 40gigs if need be. It reads all types of digital camera cards, isn't too bulky, and doesn't eat up too much power.
Blarg! Between the Roadstor and the Kanguru I publicly admit to being entirely without a clue.
That said, unless the OP is going to be saving all his CDs and posting pictures to the web once he gets home, he is going to need to find a computer to read the CDs he creates while he is on the journey and the computers he finds will likely be able to read the CD directly with either a CF to PCMCIA adapter, or a USB CF reader - and both of these are incredibly light and cheap. Put the $199 from the RoadStor or Kanguru into another Gig of CF and get either adapter (USB reader, or PCMCIA adapter) and brain dump the entire thing when he finally does find a PC with a burner.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I use the Apacer Disc Steno II.
Works fine.
Does exactly what you're describing. Fairly small, runs on 110-240VAC at 50-60Hz. Writes CDs at something like 24x.
You can burn multiple cards to a single CD (multisession), or a single card to multiple CDs (spanning) depending on your relative CD/Flash capacities.
It'll play your pictures as a slide show on a TV, or play DVDs, if that's what you're looking for. You can use it as a USB external CD drive for your computer, if you want. I haven't used either of these features. It does not have a built-in LCD for viewing pictures (there is one for copy status).
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Macally.com makes the SyncBox which allows you to transfer USB->USB without a computer for about $32. Runs on AAAs. Especially handy if you've already got a USB hard-drive based MP3 player.
At least it'd let you empty those media cards and get to an internet cafe with a CD burner less often.
Looks like the Kangaru CD-burner (above) might meet your needs better if you can justify the price tag.
If you can find a suitable tiny laptop with burner, you'll end up with a much more flexible platform for doing what you want to do.
To trickle charge your laptop, you break the chargin into two steps:
1) Trickle charge a suitable gell cell or other battery (via solar or generator on cycle)
2) Charge laptop from battery
If you are misery with your energy, you can charge a small battery with a small solar panel on your cycle all day, then charge your laptop from the battery for an hour or two at night (or simply use the battery for power, get rid of the laptop battery)
Pros: get to charge battery all day, don't need to leave laptop with charger or cycle while battery is charging (safer).
Cons: have to lug around another 5-10 pounds of stuff.
Also, you might consider using an ipaq or similar pda. It'll be less power hungry and time consuming than a cd burner, and with built in wireless you're liable to find more open hotspots than you are liable to find cyber cafe's. Connection and transmission speed should be higher going directly from the flash card to the wireless internet than from flash to cd to computer to wired internet.
-Adam
Just buy a couple of $200 MuVo2 MP3 players, extract the 4GB compact flash cards, and you have more than enough storage for the whole trip on 2 cards. Or if your camera doesn't support Type III CF or are worried about moving parts, buy several cheap 512MB solid state cards.
Either way, it is going to be more compact and reliable than dragging around a fragile CD writer + batteries and, unless you hope to buy them along the way, fragile and bulky CD-R discs. Copy the Win98 drivers onto a floppy, and you'll have no problem finding a compatible computer to upload images from the CF cards.
By the way, if you have any sort of sendoff from Sacto, let me know, and I'll buy you a beer. I was at the Trekkies II filming and also heard you (I think it was you) on KDVS awhile back, and I've been following your plans for travel here on Slashdot. No Kill I is one of the reasons I moved cross country. A region thick with Star Trek bands that don't take themselves seriously seemed pretty cool.
Good luck with the trip.
--
Evan "Gorn Subgenius"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Here is another option. It's just a battery operated HD that you can copy memory cards to. Then it hooks up with USB, as an removeable drive. Probably won't need drivers on Linux, Win2k or WinXP.e en=PROD&Store_Code=T00107&Product_Code=602 0
http://secure.serverlab.net/shop/merchant.mvc?Scr
The only caveat would be that you need to be able to hook up to a USB port at the Internet Cafe.
Can't remember what mine is, but it I found it for USD$99 for 10GB storage.
You didn't say why you are recording onto CD...
Why not just buy extra flash cards, enough so that you don't fill them up completely between cafes.
Then use a wireless PDA with flash reader to upload in the cafe, but if you're lucky the will already have a flash reader.
-- John.
I've got one of these - it's essentially a 20 gig HD with enough processing power on board to play and record audio and video.
The package I got included a gizmo that let me read compact flash, so I was able to backup all my Honeymoon photos to this device while travelling.
It is possible to charge it a lot more easily than a laptop and since it only needs to run for as long as it takes to transfer photos then it could probably go a long time between charges.
It's also a standard USB hard disk so you can plug it in to a regular PC at an opportune moment and back up things further.
Also, will you be staying with friends? I burnt some photos to CD for friends travelling with a Kodak CF-based camera. I don't know what most other people are like, but my home PC can read SM, CF and MMC, at work we can also read Memory Stick, and a couple of close friends can read SD.
get a PDA with 802.11 and a compact flash card (toshiba e740). Upload the pictures wirelessly. Very small. Can be had real cheap.
I'll just piggy-back off the first post, so I get noticed and address a bunch of comments. Thanks for all the good comments posted along with the personal emails. It's mostly useful.
I'm burning to a cd so I can post the photos on route without dealing with trying to put drivers on internet cafe computers. A friend of mine will fiddle with 'em so they load fast if I can't do that from the internet cafe computers.
It's a Ducati, being purposely built for the trip by Phil at Road & Race in Sydney Australia. Phil's updating the electronics to 12-volt so the headlight should be decent and it'll be running electronic ignition, not points. Old bikes are built tough, and besides, breaking down is part of the adventure. And duh, it's a 250cc. I'm not planning on riding down the autobahn on it. I figure it'll take me about 3 years to ride round the world.
Christ, I should've looked into a camera that burns cds. Didn't realize they existed, and I bought a Canon A70 last week. Damn. I'll reckon I should sell it and buy a Sony Mavica. Thanks, ivanandre.
For places to stay: I'll be camping and I'll meet people. Most punk rockers don't mind putting visitors up. I do it, although being in Sacramento means no one wants to visit. When I lived in San Francisco there were always someone from another country in the apartment, sometimes there'd be 10 of 'em. It works to a lesser degree with motorcycle types.
--Dave
riding round the world on an old motorcycle