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Sony Photo Vault
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More and more users are discovering the pleasures of digital photography. Images can be captured, stored on a computer and sent to an inkjet printer for a hard copy. However difficulties can arise when the storage platform or printer is not immediately available. Imagine the scenario where you are on holiday and you discover that your cameras internal memory and removable memory cards are full yet you still need to take more photographs. You would then be faced with the situation where you have to delete images or miss out on some great photographic opportunities.
Sony believes it can offer a solution to this particular problem with its Photo Vault product. This piece of kit is a Mini CD-R device that allows you to burn and play back digital content. The product can work from the mains or by using a supplied detachable battery container. The Mini part of the products title refers to the fact that this device is compact, measuring 112 x 91 x 24mm (without the battery pack), and uses the 8cm CD-R optical disks as its storage media.
Weighing 190g, this pocket-size device is eminently portable and is being targeted specifically at the digital photographer whether on holiday or on the move. In an effort to make everything as simple as possible, Sony has kept the devices controls to a minimum. There are just five buttons designated as power, mode, forward/backward cycling through images, and process activation. A small LCD window provides feedback information as to the current status of the device; disk space; and the progress of the copying process.
The main attraction of this device comes from its combination of allowing multi-session recording while being able to work without any intervention from a computer. You just need to connect the appropriate source option and press a button to start the transfer of the data. The Photo Vault is able to accept data from a digital camera, USB device or a memory card. Only the various Sony proprietary Memory Stick media types are supported.
When accepting data from the various sources, the Photo Vault is rather restrictive in what it can offer. The only option available is to transfer all or none of the available files. You therefore need to carry out some housekeeping by removing unwanted items before starting a transfer operation.
You should be able to store between 50 and 200 images on a single 8cm CD-R. The actual number will be dependent on image resolution. According to my tests it would require around nine minutes to burn a full disk with data.
As mentioned earlier, the Photo Vault is a multi-session device. This means you can continue to add data to a disk until its capacity has been filled. These sessions can be carried out at various times. A new folder will be created for each session and this will take the date of the newest file as its name.
The Photo Vault has a Video Out socket, and is supplied with an output cable, enabling it to be connected to a television for viewing the images burned on its optical media. In this way images can be viewed as thumbnails, in full-screen mode or as a slide show using the control buttons on the Photo Vault. Images need to be in JPEG format.
While the Photo vault has been designed and marketed as a digital photo storage device, it can also be used to store other types of data without any problems. This means you can use the device to burn disks with MP3 files, Word documents and various other types of files for transferring from one location to another. An option is available to copy data to multiple CD-R disks.
The Sony Photo Vault should be available for around £140. For that price you get the Mini CD-R device, one 200MB mini CD-R disk, battery pack, Video Out cable, AC adapter and UK/EU power cables.
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