Take Hundreds of Pictures

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1999 by Carlos Carrillo

RELY ON A MEGAPIXEL digital camera for business on the road? You may love the image quality but find you're always running out of room on your SmartMedia or Compact-Flash cards--or paying a small fortune for the capacity you need.

Although digital camera technology has enjoyed breakthroughs resulting in high-resolution models that previously cost $1,000 or more becoming widely available in the $400 to $800 range, digital media storage has lagged behind, plagued by high prices, low capacities, and incompatible formats. The good news is that vendors are finally playing catch-up by providing higher-capacity media at lower prices.

Lexar, which refers to its silicon storage cards as "digital film," recently announced a 32MB SmartMedia card priced at $99, as well as a USB-compatible CompactFlash card with a whopping 128MB capacity that should make its way into name-brand products by year's end. Besides upping the storage capacity, the card's USB support makes it easier to use: To transfer images, you simply connect with the USB cable and download the images from your camera to your PC's hard disk.

If you use a high-end camera equipped with a PC Card slot for storing images, a 320MB PC Card costs as much as $1,100. At half the price, IBM's 340MB Microdrive ($499; kit includes PC Card hard disk, adapter, and field case; www.ibm.com), a Type II CF+ PC Card, stores up to 1,000 digital images compressed at low resolution.

Beyond the great price and whopping capacity, the Microdrive is faster than comparable PC Card products, eliminating lag time between shots and letting you take photos at near-traditional 35mm speed. The downside to the Microdrive is its moving parts, which make it more susceptible to damage from rough handling than flash memory.