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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/
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
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.
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.