The Gmini 120 was purchased for ofloading pictures from a sandisk 512Meg flash card for my Canon digital rebel SLR Digital camera. we purchased all of this equipment for our 3000 mile motorcycle trip in cananda this last summer. It was all mounted in a Pelican 1300 bright yellow water tight plastic box. The box when packed for the trip included:
Gmini 120
Canon digital rebel body
canon wide angle lense (with body $950? at costco)
canon 75-300mm zoom lense
battery charger and spare battery for camera
With this we were more than set for a week of motorcycling and photography. when the 512meg CF card is full you just take it out of the camera, put it in the CF slot in the Gmini and download it to the interal 20 gig HD. it made for an awesome trip which allowed us to take low or non compressed images on a 6 megapixel camera and not worry about space constraints. I know you can purchase up to about 4 gig CF cards now for a reasonable price, but the Gmini 120 gives you 20 GIG! I Think they were even planning a Gmini 140 (40 gig drive) but I have never seen it for sale. I think I could probably open the Gmini and put a larger drive in it but I haven't had the need yet. The main thing that made this a usable MP3 player was the addition of the CF card reader that allows it to backup CF cards.
one MAJOR downfall of the Gmini is that you can only DOWNLOAD from a CF card. you can't go the other way and put pictures back on the card to look at with your camera. arg.. they gotta fix that. maybe i'll email the manufacture and suggest it.
all in all the gmini is a good and affordable solution to photo storage. I did see a CF to IDE reader/copier in a little box for sale at compusa the other day. it cost $99 wich isn't to bad but it did NOT have the 2.5"ide drive, so you had to do it as kind of a kit. by the time you finish 'building' it i'm sure the price would be closer to 150. so given even the options I have today I'm happy with the gmini as it gives me a good level of refinement. enhancements over the 99$ option?
screen
mp3 player
imbedded rechargable battery
nice USB interface
nice small METAL finish
if ya need it, check it out!
2 comments:
it seems like i saw several flavors of cf to ide adaptors (including the 2.5") when i looked hard and started keeping track of manufacturing names. seems like the bare bones kits where like 20$, but i could be wrong.
the absolute cheapest barebones I found when I was looking last was around 50$, but that was BARELY functional. as in long filenames, directorys, no usb, etc. type of problems, so yeah, i'm sure you could do it cheaper but if your pretty sure it will never work right why bother
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