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

["Arthur Entlich" <artistic-1@shaw.ca>]

Hi Bob,

Thank you for both the detailed explanations and the link.  I did look
at the newspaper link, and it has some interesting suggestions.

About a year or more ago, I wrote Sony and suggested that they remove
the CDR/RW drive from their high end Malvica cameras and make it an add
on, with a battery pack and 12 volt car adapter.  This 3" disk model
obviously already ran on batteries, since it was part of the camera.
With new firmware, it would have allowed for downloading from any device
(and any camera, similarly to the Kanguru (great name) drive, even if it
was via flash memory), yet be smaller (holding about 150 megs) use less
power and be pocket-portable.  It would also have removed the most
vulnerable part of the Malvica cameras from the camera (as a mechanical
device not only was it probably a battery hog, but also was the item
most likely to fail).

Anyway, Sony wouldn't listen, so the Kanguru looks like an interesting
alternative.

One think I still don't quite understand.  My digital camera, as soon as
it is attached to the USB port of my computer and turned on, obviously
communicates with the computer, because the LCD screen of the camera
reads "Communicating with computer" and the computer launches the
downloading software, and the download is both sent to the hard drive
and to a memory resident program, so I can see thumbnails of the images
on the computer screen.

Would there be no way to make the camera request info off the jump drive
and then handshake and download the image data to it, or must a CPU be
controlling the communications back and forth?

Art

Bob Shomler wrote:

>>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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