TINY BOX LETS FLASH MEMORY DEVICES TRANSFER DATA
OK so there you are taking pictures with your digital camera when
you suddenly discover that you have filled up its memory card.
Scanning through all of your pictures only shows that they¹re all
great so you can't delete any to make more room. And your computer
is back home and you don't lug around a laptop to off-load them
either. So now what do you do? This common scenario continues to
plague the unprepared digital shutterbug so let me suggest two easy
solutions.
The first and most simple is to carry around a few extra memory
cards or at the very least just one with a large storage capacity.
Given that you can buy a one gigabyte card these days for under a
hundred bucks, this makes a lot of sense. The other and less
expensive solution is to use a thumb drive. That's those flash
memory storage devices that easily fit on a keychain. And just like
the flash memory in your digital camera, thumb drives need no power
to maintain any pictures you store inside them. These mass storage
devices look just like a hard drive when you plug them into a
computer's USB port. But wait a minute. Your digital camera doesn't
have a USB port so how can you plug in a thumb drive? And even if
you could, how could you copy the data out from the camera into the
flash drive? Fortunately the folks from Macally have the answers.
 The
SyncBox is a tiny 2.5 ounce black box that easily fits in the palm
of your hand. On one side of the box is a USB port into which you
can plug in your digital camera using the same supplied cable you
would use to plug it into your computer. On the other side of the
SyncBox is a USB port into which you plug your thumb drive. The
SyncBox supports both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices. The camera gets
its power from its batteries. The thumb drive gets its power from
the SyncBox's 3 AAA batteries that make it operate. Once everything
is plugged in, you have some choices to make before you press the
big transfer button.
On the side of the SyncBox is a switch that lets you select from
two modes. The DISK mode tells the SyncBox to simply transfer all of
the contents from the camera or any USB source device you have
plugged in, and copy it into the target device which in this example
is the thumb drive. The FOLDER mode lets you be a little bit more
selective. When a transfer begins, only the contents in a folder
named "syncbox" will be copied into the thumb drive. Most digital
cameras let you create folders into which you can store different
photographs. In this case, you would name one syncbox and use it to
hold all of the pictures you want to transfer. As your photos are
being copied, the SyncBox will automatically create a folder on the
thumb drive named "Sync001" and if it already exists, it will create
folders named Sync002, Sync003 and so on. This is done to protect
any existing images that you may already have copied to the thumb
drive from being overwritten.
When you have everything ready to transfer and you have selected
the proper mode, simply press the one large button on the SyncBox
and the transfer process will begin. A green LED indicator lights
when the unit is turned on and flashes if the power is running low.
The second LED indicator blinks steadily to show a transfer is in
progress. If an error occurs, the indicator will turn red. Otherwise
it remains off. Since there is no screen to monitor the transfer
process, these indicators are the only way to confirm that the
transfer of your images has been completed, so they are very
important to watch.
Although the SyncBox was designed with digital cameras in mind,
you can easily adapt it to work with other portable devices such as
mp3 players to transfer your music files. If you frequently use your
digital camera, sooner or later you're going to find yourself
unexpectedly running out of memory. Having a SyncBox in your pocket
could prove to be a real picture-saver. And at $49 plus the cost of
a thumb drive, it's both a good value and a terrific backup system.
www.macally.com |
