[filmscanners] Re: Off Topic: About those USB flash memorydrives...

["Bob Shomler" <bobf2@shomler.com>]

>I was wondering if, rather than buying Secure Digital cards, is there
>some way to use these USB jump disks to download the image files without
>special software, or can I load the software onto the jump disk so it
>will communicate with the camera and allow a download of the image files?

Hello Art.  USB jump drives are I/O devices that connect to host computers that 
use host-side USB drivers to issue comands to usb-attached devices.  The jump 
drives expect to receive I/O commands to access, read from and write to the 
disks.  I don't know of any cameras that can do this for USB I/O.  (Sony could 
write to diskettes with some if its cameras.)  The USB drives I've seen have no 
ability to initiate I/O to other devices.

What you want is a device that acts like a host computer with capability to 
either read camera media cards or connect to and read from the camera.  The 
former is better.  Except for full-fledged computers such as laptops, the 
latter is unlikely given that each camera model would require specific support 
(ie, a camera-model-specific USB device driver).

In addition to laptop systems there are some limited-function host-type devices 
that will accept media cards, read data from them, and write the image file 
data from the card to hard drives or to CD-Rs.  They're  more expensive than 
jump drives, though.  Mike Langberg, a technology columnist for the San Jose 
Mercury News, last Thursday reviewed some new entries in this field.  His 
column may be seen at
   
www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/tech_test_drive/7910335.htm

The Mercury provides free access only for seven days so you'll want to read 
this in the next day or two.

>If not that, if I were to connect the jump disk to the camera while
>shooting, could the camera see this flash memory as usable and send
>images to it?

Unlikely.  So far as I've seen on cameras, they act as I/O and connect only to 
host systems or host-type devices with camera-model-specific support.

Bob Shomler
www.shomler.com

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