Belkin IPOD DIGITAL CAMERA LINK ( F8E477 )

Rating:
Summary: Good idea, if it worked
Review: I thought this would be a great product for vacation photos. I like to save my pictures as full resolution and minimal compression so I fill up my memory card rather quickly. It'd be great to transfer the photos to my iPod so I could take thousands of pictures and not worry about running out of space.

Unfortunately, this product worked poorly the 2 or 3 times that it actually transferred pictures and then it stopped working altogether.

Don't waste your money on this item. I'd put my money toward a 1GB memory card.

Rating:
Summary: A Solid Product, One Fault
Review: The Belkin Digital Camera Link is to date the best way to back up photos directly from your digital camera to your iPod. I use my DCL with a 20GB 4G iPod, and it works well. Because it relies on USB 1.1, transfers are not as fast as a FireWire card reader plugged into my G4, but the speed is respectable.

You plug the DCL into the iPod, then you plug in your camera. Once the camera is ready, press the button on the DCL and the LEDs on the front start an animation which indicates that it's transferring. When the animation stops, the transfer is complete. If the LEDs turn red, theres a problem. Only turned red for me when I tried a MicroDrive in a card reader (see below).

This works well on my Canon PowerShot S50. It also worked with a CompactFlash card plugged into a generic USB card reader. It did not work with an IBM MicroDrive. It transfers photos and movies with no problem.

One fault: It doesn't remove the photos from the camera after downloading. You have to do that on the camera.

Rating:
Summary: Stopped working halfway through vacation
Review: You take your iPod everywhere you go. You'd think it'd be the perfect place to store your photos. For the time being, I'd recommend finding another solution.

For one, this device is slow. This is not terribly surprising given that it transfers via USB, but still it's very slow. And because the iPod is spending all of this time writing to its HD, a transfer will completely drain the iPod's battery (and probably your camera's).

Your photos will appear on your iPod as opaque "rolls." The only way to verify that all of your pictures have transferred is to compare the picture count on the iPod to that on your camera.

I knew of these limitations when I bought the product, so none of these were disappointing (though my wife was surprised at how clunky a process it was).

The frustration came when, halfway into our month-long vacation, the Camera Link was convinced my iPod was full and refused to make any more transfers. When I checked, my iPod had 4 GB free. I tried transferring from my camera. I tried from my wife's. Nothing. The device suddenly became a useless brick.

After a bit of panicking, we found a department store with kiosks that would copy your memory card to a CD. This is, IMO, a much better solution. It was faster to walk to the store, insert the memory card, and burn a CD than to stay in the hotel room and wait for this thing to work. Cheaper, too. Next vacation, I'll just do that.