When Apple designed the iPad, they opted for simplicity and omitted things like a USB port or memory card slots. This made it more tedious for photographers to transfer a large number of photographs onto their iPads, since the Camera Connection Kit needed for USB and SD Card support comes in two separate dongles. Luckily, there’s a made-in-China knockoff that can ease a little of the pain — the 3-in-1 iPad Camera Connection Kit combines the two dongles into one nicely designed apparatus. Available in both black and white, it comes with a USB port, a SD Card slot, and a Micro SD Card slot. Pick one up over at the M.I.C Gadget store for $29.90.
3-in-1 iPad Camera Connection Kit (via Engadget)
Have numerous SD cards you need to access at once? The Elecom MR-C27 SD card reader is a four-slot card reader that allows you to do just that. It allows you to access up to 64GB of data, and looks like a cute little toaster connected to your computer via USB. It’ll be available for ¥3,980 (~$48) starting mid-December in Japan.
Elecom MR-C27 SD Card Reader (via Wired)
If you have a laptop that doesn’t have memory card slots built in, then you probably know how annoying it is to have to plug in a card reader every time you transfer photos. The new MR-C25 Series of memory card readers by Elecom tries to solve this problem by making the USB card reader sit flush against the side of your laptop, meaning they can stay attached to your laptop when you stow it away. They also have a 180 degree rotating body that allows you to access other ports that might be blocked. It’ll start selling sometime this month, but no word on how much it will cost.
Elecom MR-C25 (via Wired)
Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony’s technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I’ve used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open source command-line application that’s bundled with TestDisk, something I’ve successfully used to regain access to inaccessible external hard drives.
In this post I’m going to show you how you can use PhotoRec to recover your photos if you’ve accidentally deleted them or formatted your memory card.
Read more…
Viral marketing agency The Viral Factory is helping Samsung with an experiment in which they’re planning to drop 100 SD cards attached to paper airplanes from 21 miles above the Earth in the stratosphere. Instructions will be printed on the paper airplane informing anyone who finds one of the experiment and what they can do to participate. Finders are encouraged to shoot with the cards and then upload anything taken to the Project Space Planes website.
The claim that the planes will “carry the messages across the world” is a bit farfetched, but supposedly the planes could potentially travel hundreds of miles depending on the wind conditions. The experiment is planned for mid-October.
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Here’s a terrific “Doh! Why didn’t I think of that?” idea shared by Flickr user Ralph Odenwälder in his photostream: create a set of matching Polaroid photographs for an awesome do-it-yourself memory card game that you can either give someone as a present or play yourself!
Of course, you could do the same thing by making duplicate prints with your digital or film photographs, but somehow it just doesn’t feel the same…
(via Photojojo)
Image credit: PolaMemo by ralder and used with permission
Photographer Petra Hall‘s fiancé recently bought a used MG convertible right before going on a vacation. However, on the way back from work the weekend before the vacation was to begin, something in the car exploded and the car went up in flames.
The list of gadgets in the car is enough to make a grown man weep: a Canon 7D, a Canon 24-105L lens, and a MacBook Air. Everything burned up.
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SanDisk has just announced that Japan’s police force has adopted its 1GB SD WORM memory card for collecting evidence. The Write Once, Read Many cards are tamperproof, can only be written to using a WORM-compatible device, and supposedly stores data reliably for 100 years. Practically speaking, this means that photographs and audio can be collected onto the cards, allowing those who access the data later on to be confident that it wasn’t tampered or edited in any way. The National Police in Japan have tested the technology extensively, and seem to be convinced of SanDisk’s claims.
We can’t really think of any practical application for ordinary photographers (can you?), but it’s interesting to know that this kind of technology is out there and being used.
SanDisk just released its 64GB Ultra SDXC (extended capacity) memory card, the largest capacity for the Secure Digital format. It has a read speed of up to 15MB/second, stores up to eight hours of high-definition video, and costs $350. The new card uses the SD 3.0 specification, which allows capacities up to 2TB (2000GB).
It just so happens that today the CompactFlash Association also announced the CF5.0 specification, which allows memory cards up to 144PB (petabytes), or 150,994,944GB. Oh boy.
Sadly, the new Compact Flash specification only affords transfer speeds up to 32MB/s, meaning a full 144PB card would take about 153 years to transfer.
Here’s a story that’s sure to drop your jaws: A Spanish trawlerman named Benito Estevez was recently fishing off the west coast of Europe when his net brought up a digital camera from the Atlantic seabed.
Five photographs were recovered from the camera’s memory card, and included shots of a man and woman posing on the deck of a ship (seen to the left).
In one of the photographs (bottom), a woman is seen on the deck of the QM2 cruise liner, with the QE2 in the background. BBC News reported the story on television last night, and published it online early this morning. This afternoon, they reported that the owners had been found. A friend of the owners, living in England, noticed their photographs last night just as she was about to switch off her television.
Turns out the owners, Barbara and Dennis Gregory of South Africa, were traveling from New York to Southampton in 2008 when the camera fell overboard into the Atlantic. Mrs. Gregory says,
Somebody spotted dolphins in the water and the two of us jumped up and that was it. It literally bounced off his lap, across the deck and into the water with hardly a splash and it was gone. [...] There’s no way we could ever have imagined that this thing would ever turn up again. It sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. [...] You daydream that it might happen that these pictures are going to pop up somewhere, but you don’t think it’s ever going to happen.
It’s absolutely mindboggling.
We agree.
(via Digital Photography Review)
