A must have for Digital Camera
Written: Jan 10 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Storage Size, Cost
Cons: Eat Up Battery, possible data loss if dropped
The Bottom Line: If you want plenty of storage for your digicam, looks no further than the microdrive.
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| seowfun's Full Review: IBM MicroDrive |
I had been thinking that a digital camera will be a great tool for me to learn photography, because experimentation on it is free. When I go on a photo shooting trips, I can shoot as much as possible without worrying running out of space. But that won't happen unless I have LARGE storage.
After seeing the highly rated Canon G1 camera support the 1GB microdrive, I decided to jump into digital photography. Boy! I never regret that decision. After owning the camera and the drive, I had quite a few of photos that I will never be able to produce if I didn't have a digicam with this amount of storage.
Form Factors
The microdrive is Compact Flash II form factor, so only digicam that accept the CF2 format accepts. There are quite a few high quality digicams, such as the Canon G1, G2, S30, S40, D30, 1D, Nikon CP 995, D1X, Olympus E-10, E-20 supports this drive.
Ease of Use and Reliabitlity
The drive is easily inserted into the CF2 slot of my G1. After taking the picture, I put it into the PCMCIA adapter, and insert it into the PC card slot of my laptop. Then I can download the pictures in no time. I have took about 5000 pictures with my G1, and no failures or corruptions had ever happened.
If you have pocket PC with built in CF2 slot, such as the Casio E-125, you can easily expand the storage of your pocket PC with this drive.
Cost per megabytes
The 1GB microdrive cost around $350 nowadays. If you calculate $/Megabyte, nothing, including solid state CF, smart media, Sony memory stick, and others even come close.
Battery Life
The microdrive did decrease the numbers of pictures I can take with a fully charged B-511. People claims they can take about 200 pics on the G1 using regular CF, but with microdrive, I can take about 130 pics with it.
Dropping the Card
Since the microdrive use rotating disk technology, data can be lost if the disk is dropped. It won't be as reliable as solid state storage in this respect.
Access Speed
Dpreview.com has a comparison chart of access speed (read, write) between different brands of CF cards and microdrive. The microdrive actually perform respectable. It is not the fastest, but not the slowest either.
However, startup time of digicam with microdrive does appears to be longer.
Summary
Overall, I am very happy with the microdrive. It has not dissappoint me so far, and it enable me to takes pictures without worrying about storage space. With the amount of storage, and the cost, I can live with few of its minor shortcomings.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
seowfun
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Reviews written: 31
Trusted by: 4 members
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