MTalley
22nd of June 2005 (Wed), 22:13
Well, my long anticpated vacation has officially started as of 6:00 PM this evening. I'm packing up the camping and camera gear in my 4x4 and heading off to the woods for an extended weekend.
This will be my first time away from home without my laptop, instead relying on my Flashtrax to archive my shots. I've been giving the Flashtrax a workout since I received it last Friday, copying files to and fro, dumping memory cards to it, playing some MP3's, just because, etc.
I actually got some idea of battery life today. I was dumping a bunch of stuff to the unit from my laptop, to clear off some space on my hard drive. When you plug the USB cable into the unit, the "Charge" light comes on, so I figured maybe it was smart enough to draw power from USB and potentially charge the battery. Apparently not.
After about 3.5 hours of mostly continuous use, Windows informed me that it couldn't copy a file to the unit. Upon closer inspection, the Flashtrax had shut itself down due to a low battery. This was all with the screen flipped down and, thus, the backlight was not active.
The battery has been charging this evening while copying all of my backup files from the Flashtrax to my other external 120GB drive.
So far, I'm pretty pleased with the unit. Not having seen an Epson P-2000 up close and personal, I can't give any general comparisons. However, I do notice that the interface on the unit is rather clunky and slow. Also, displaying fine JPG images of about 4-5 MB in size takes almost as many seconds (4 to 5) to load and display each image. Not exactly impressive, but also not the primary reason I bought the unit.
I did some "time trials" with the unit compared to my laptop. To be fair, my laptop has an older USB 1.1 interface. However, copying the contents of a CF to the Flashtrax is about 25% faster than copying the same files via a USB card reader to my laptop. Copying from the Flashtrax to the laptop is about 8% faster than from the card reader to the laptop. All testing done with a 512MB Sandisk Ultra II card filled with images (about 510MB worth).
We'll see how the unit fares in the great outdoors this weekend.
This will be my first time away from home without my laptop, instead relying on my Flashtrax to archive my shots. I've been giving the Flashtrax a workout since I received it last Friday, copying files to and fro, dumping memory cards to it, playing some MP3's, just because, etc.
I actually got some idea of battery life today. I was dumping a bunch of stuff to the unit from my laptop, to clear off some space on my hard drive. When you plug the USB cable into the unit, the "Charge" light comes on, so I figured maybe it was smart enough to draw power from USB and potentially charge the battery. Apparently not.
After about 3.5 hours of mostly continuous use, Windows informed me that it couldn't copy a file to the unit. Upon closer inspection, the Flashtrax had shut itself down due to a low battery. This was all with the screen flipped down and, thus, the backlight was not active.
The battery has been charging this evening while copying all of my backup files from the Flashtrax to my other external 120GB drive.
So far, I'm pretty pleased with the unit. Not having seen an Epson P-2000 up close and personal, I can't give any general comparisons. However, I do notice that the interface on the unit is rather clunky and slow. Also, displaying fine JPG images of about 4-5 MB in size takes almost as many seconds (4 to 5) to load and display each image. Not exactly impressive, but also not the primary reason I bought the unit.
I did some "time trials" with the unit compared to my laptop. To be fair, my laptop has an older USB 1.1 interface. However, copying the contents of a CF to the Flashtrax is about 25% faster than copying the same files via a USB card reader to my laptop. Copying from the Flashtrax to the laptop is about 8% faster than from the card reader to the laptop. All testing done with a 512MB Sandisk Ultra II card filled with images (about 510MB worth).
We'll see how the unit fares in the great outdoors this weekend.