I was pleasantly surprised two days ago when my wife gave me my early birthday present. I didn’t expect a present, since we are heading out on a huge road trip (more on that in the next post). With the price of gas, can you say “Ka-ching”? I also didn’t expect to receive the Epson P-3000. It’s a gadget I’ve had my eye on for quite a long time now, but just haven’t had the need to justify it. That is, until we decided to go on this road trip. I’ve been stressing about how in the world I was going to take photos over a 10 day period and store them all on two 2 gig memory cards. I had some plans. Take less photos. Be vigilant in deleting really bad photos. Upload them to my host when I could gain access to a computer, so I could free up the memory card space.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to all that trouble. My wife decided to shock the hell out of me by giving me the Epson P-3000. A 40 gig, multimedia storage viewer.
The 4 inch screen on this has excellent detail (16.7 million colors) and is just awesome. It’s so much better than viewing it on the back of the camera. Plus, you can zoom in and it displays RAW files. It slices, it dices, oh wait. That’s something else. It not only allows me to easily backup my images and view them, but it also has “extras” on it. For what I need this for, I don’t need the “extras”, but they are nice. Slide show capabilities, with music if you please. It plays videos and MP3′s. I even went and purchased an auxiliary cable yesterday and plugged it into the vehicle we are taking on the trip. I figure about 20 gigs of MP3′s should give us about 75 hours of music. Way better than burning 25+ CD’s.
On the side of the P-3000, it has a high speed USB 2.0 connection for copying files to and from your computer. I haven’t timed it, but it appears to copy a lot faster than when I copy my memory cards over to my computer. Very nice feature!! It also has an audio/video out and a host connector on the side.
The top of the Epson P-3000 has two slots for SD and Compact Flash cards. Just plop them in, choose backup and before you know it, your card has been successfully copied over. There’s an option to erase memory card after it’s done copying, however, to me it’s a little risky to have that on. You never know when a hardware failure may happen. No need to destroy your photos on your memory card until you are absolutely sure they copied over and are not corrupt.
The bottom line? The Epson P-3000 just plain rocks! It’s going to come in handy for my upcoming trip and next year, when we take our genetic experiment (our almost 9 year old son) to Disney World. If the 40 gig hard drive isn’t enough for you, Epson offers an 80 gig hard drive in the P-5000.
