Commentary

InformationWeek
InformationWeek  

CES: Digital Foci's Portable Media Player Sucks Content Directly Off CF & SD Cards And Memory Sticks

DisplayLink may have one of the most killer technologies to be on display here in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. But one of the killer products is Digital Foci's Picture Porter Elite. It's a hard drive-based portable digital media player for digital photos, videos, and music. So what you say? Everyone has something like that? What is really remarkable about the Picture Porter Elite is how it totally eliminates the need for a PC to copy content from something like your digital camera's CF or SD card onto its hard drive.

DisplayLink may have one of the most killer technologies to be on display here in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. But one of the killer products is Digital Foci's Picture Porter Elite. It's a hard drive-based portable digital media player for digital photos, videos, and music. So what you say? Everyone has something like that? What is really remarkable about the Picture Porter Elite is how it totally eliminates the need for a PC to copy content from something like your digital camera's CF or SD card onto its hard drive.

How many times have you been in that situation where your camera's memory card is full and you need to clear it off so you can take more pictures or video. Normally, you need a PC to do this. You'd attach the camera to your PC, download the pictures, and then delete them from the camera's memory (usually a memory card like a CF or SD card).


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

But what if there's no PC around (this actually happens to me all the time)? That's where the Picture Porter Elite comes in. Instead of hunting down a PC to "route" and delete the content, all you have to do is take the memory card out of your camera and insert it into the Picture Porter Elite. Then, using the Picture Porter's user interface, it's relatively easy to copy the content off the memory card and onto the Picture Porter's hard drive. It can handle CF cards, MicroDrives, SD cards, MultiMedia Cards (MMC), and Memory Sticks.

Not only is the Picture Porter a great media playback device (it has a bright, 3.6" screen), it has a port for playing back its content through a home entertainment system. But wait, it does more. It can even record video content from a TV and it can print photos to photo printers that support PictBridge. I dug up the online spec sheet and it really is quite amazing what Digital Foci has packed into this little package.

One of the neat features that Digital Foci's director of business development Charles Huang talks about on the video is how, when you connect the Picture Porter Elite to a PC via a USB cable, three storage devices will show up on your PC: the Picture Porter's hard drive, the CF card that's in the Picture Porter's CF slot (if you have one in there) and the SD card or Memory Stick that's in the Picture Porter's other slot (if that slot is occupied). It's very well thought out and the price is right too: capacities range from 40 to 160 Gbytes and the price ranges from $300 to $500.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links