>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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
