Posted on Mon, Oct. 30, 2006 Pack spare space for your camera PICTURE PORTER ELITE ALSO PLAYS VIDEO, MUSIC By Larry Magid Special to the Mercury News Here's the problem: You're on a trip with your digital camera and you're running out of space on the camera's memory card. The Picture Porter Elite lets you insert the memory card to back up your photos to the device's internal hard drive. Once safely on the device, you can later transfer the photos to a laptop or PC with a supplied USB cable or through a memory card reader. Of course, you wouldn't need the Picture Porter if you traveled with a laptop, since you could just back up the memory card to the machine's hard drive. But if you're without a PC, Picture Porter comes in handy with its spacious 40, 80 or 100-gigabyte hard drive. If that were all this device did, it would be worth its 11-ounce weight, though perhaps not its $399-and-up price tag. But it's also a good picture viewer, MP3 music player and video player capable of handling MPEG-1, MPEG-4, WMV9, MJPEG and video files. I tested the 80-gigabyte version ($469) by plugging in the SD memory card from my digital camera and selecting backup. Once safely copied to the drive, I reformatted the card so it was ready for more pictures. I also used the Picture Porter to show off the pictures, one at a time and as a slide show. While I was at it, I also copied about 8,000 digital photos from my PC to the device along with a couple of homemade videos. After all this, I still had about 60 gigabytes free. Picture Porter Elite comes from a Southern California company, Rancho Dominguez-based Digital Foci, at www.digitalfoci.com.
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