CES: Digital Foci's Portable Media Player Sucks Content Directly Off CF & SD Cards And Memory Sticks
Posted by David Berlind, Jan 8, 2008 01:58 PM » E-Mail
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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).
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 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.
