With the advent of digital camera's, every serious photographer needs to archive his pictures and to empty the memory cards. There are of course lots of different ways to do this.
The first one is to have a card reader on a PC and copy the card to the local hard disk. The more flexible solution is to have a separate hard disk you connect via USB to your laptop or desktop PC. The advantage is that you can carry the hard disk with you. The third solution is to burn a disk (CD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, ...) on your PC - the most reliable long term archival system at this moment.
The fourth solution is to use a portable archival device. There
are two types, the ones with color display and the ones without color display.
Personally I prefer to have a system with a good color display to be able to
check if the pictures are ok and to use it for other applications as well.
Typically those devices are compact and come with a small computing platform,
connectivity (CF, SD or both, USB, video in and out, audio in and out, headphone
out, ...) and a hard disk drive.
The ones I have looked at are the Jobo (the old version and the new version) and the Vosonic VP8360.
Both devices are really excellent but are meant for different types of users. The Jobo is rather expensive but has an incredible high resolution display, and a lot of features very useful to pro-photographers (dust detection, RGB histograms,...). The display is a good reason to select the Jobo, probably the best device on the market. But at the moment I really needed one, the Jobo new generation was not yet available on the market. A small thing, the Jobo is rather big but nicely protected (HD hangs in the middle of the box).
I ended up with the Vosonic VP8360 because it was available and
has an unbeatable price/functionality ratio. It can read almost anything
(picture formats), has a built-in CF and SD card reader, USB can record audio
and video (CVBS), comes with all cables, power supply, battery, docking
station. Next to pictures, the device can play audio and video files (lots of
different formats). The resolution of the display is lower than that of the Jobo
(the new version) but the display is very readable, and the zoom function is
quite fast. A nice device to use overall, the one I would recommend if you are
on a budget. And you can change the hard disk drive yourself very easily. The battery
can be changed by the user as well.
One important remark about the Vosonic, the previous software
release had a few problems (wrong colors in D200 thumbnails, some CF cards
not recognized, backup not always working) all those problems have been solved
with the recent software update -> highly recommend to check for a software
upgrade after buying such a device.
In practice I am using it as a third backup: I try to keep all pictures on separate CF cards, I copy the card to my PC and/or external USB hard disk drive and on the storage device, so there is no risk at all to lose anything.
The pros
The cons