Thanks to the recommendation of my friend Oscar, I purchased a very interesting and slick new device for my [Leica] digital camera: a portable hard disk/digital media reader combo. Not much bigger than a pack of cards, this 10GB drive has a little slot on the front that can read and save the contents of either SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards, allowing me to toss this in my camera bag and effectively take thousands and thousands of pictures. Or, what I plan on doing, copy my entire picture library onto the unit then have a quite portable device for showing the pictures to family and friends with USB-capable computers.

It’s the 21st Century version of the slide show with pop-out screen (and, yes, I have my parents old Kodak Carousel slide projector, a half-dozen reels, and the fold-out projection screen too. But not for long!). One advantage, though, is that you can go from picture 3 to picture 8,347 without having to view the 8,344 pictures between!

The unit is a Sima Image Bank SP-150, and it was about $250 from AVstreet.com. It works with both Mac and PC (any device that can see a USB-based hard disk, actually, so it’d work with Linux computers too). Here’s a link to the manufacturer’s info too, if you’re interested. There are similar units out there, but the capabilities and space on the disk make this an exceptional bargain, from my research.

Highly recommended!

… and, of course, now I need to think of what I can take thousands of pictures of, so I can fill it up!