Taking your camera on the road is all well and good until your memory card fills up. Starting with Epson’s P-3000, Harley Ogier tests two portable storage devices that can free up your memory card and let you carry on shooting.

The P-3000 is the entry-level model in Epson’s range of multimedia storage viewers, targeted at the “professional photographer and advanced amateur”. Half backup device, half media player, it does a pretty good job of both but doesn’t push the boundaries of either.

Strangely familiar

Users of digital cameras will find the P-3000 extremely familiar: it’s shaped so like a compact camera, I can’t hold it without my index finger reaching for an imaginary shutter button. The controls are set to the right of the screen, just as you find on most digital cameras, with nice anatomical grips on each side.

The menus are like those of most cameras combined with those of a media player. You’ll find options such as My Photos and My Videos, all of which are pretty clear. The fonts are smooth, the icons simple yet sharp and the whole thing has a slick feel that really flattens the learning curve.

Backup

Being an entry-level model the P-3000 only features a 40GB hard drive that could store perhaps 10,000 12 megapixel JPEG photos or a few thousand RAW files. It’s not going to last you a month-long world tour if you shoot 500 RAW images a day, but it’s still a decent capacity for selective photographers or short trips.

The backup process is simple: just pop in your card and select ‘Memory Card Backup’. It’s not the fastest process, taking 10 minutes to back up my two-gigabyte card. Memory card support is also limited to the industry standards — if your camera uses a proprietary format such as xD or Sony’s Memory Stick, you’ll need an optional adapter.

Restoring your backups to a memory card or USB drive is simple, though connecting the P-3000 to a computer requires Epson’s proprietary software. Once the software is installed all’s well, but one wonders why it doesn’t just appear on the desktop as a normal USB device.

Playback

Avoid copying unfocussed or noisy images across to the P-3000 because its brilliantly perfect 4-inch LCD is going to show you just how bad they are. With four dots per pixel (instead of the usual three), colours are stunning.Your average LCD computer monitor just can’t compare — Epson’s top-end P-7000 viewer can actually be used as a second computer screen to check your image colours.

The P-3000 supports RAW files from a wide range of camera manufacturers and JPEGs up to 30 megapixels. A good range of video formats are also supported, along with MP3 and WMA audio files. You can’t play music in the background while working with images or anything so fancy, but the P-3000 could happily replace a basic MP3 player.

Conclusion

The P-3000 lacks any advanced backup features and suffers from limited storage. However, the display quality is superb and the model a good choice for reviewing images and making short-term backups. For megapixel-hungry professionals or longer term storage, look at the P-7000, which features a 160GB hard drive for four times the capacity.

Specs

• Manufacturer: Epson

• Model: P-3000

• Display: 4-inch LCD, 640 x 480 pixels, 16.7 million colours

• Memory: 40GB

• Memory Card Support: CompactFlash (Type I/II), Microdrive, SD, MMC, MMCplus

• Image Formats: JPEG (up to 30MP), RAW (Epson, Nikon, Canon, Konica Minolta, Pentax, Sony, Olympus, FujiFilm, Adobe DNG)

• Video Formats: MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, Motion JPEG, WMV

• Audio Formats: MP3, MPEG4-AAC, WMA

• Battery: Lithium-ion

• Size: 150 x 88.7 x 33.1mm

• Weight: 426g

Contact

www.epson.co.nz

PROS

• Stunning screen quality

• Extensive file format support

CONS

• Check that your memory card is supported

Design                      18
Performance             16
Features                   17
Image Quality           20
Value for money       14

TOTAL     85/100

This article if from D-Photo issue 29.

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