« [ BEYOND REASONABLE DROUGHT ] | Main | [ WELCOME THE CANON EOS 40D ] »
September 06, 2007
[ CANON M80 media storage device ]
Price: $1100
Good but expensive
The low-down: This is an image, movie and music portable storage device with an 80gb hard drive. It is compact – 140x80x33 – and solid, 370 grams. Construction is robust and emulates Canon EOS cameras in its appearance and the layout of controls. The 90mm LCD has very high resolution and can be viewed from wide angles. There are slots for CF and SD camera memory cards, but not for XD or Memory Stick. The battery has a claimed capacity between charges for 2.6 hours of movie playback and 4.8 hours of music (using earphones). Supported file types are JPEG, TIFF and Canon RAW for photographs, MPEG 1, 2 and 4 for movies and MP3 and WAV for audio. The battery is of the same type as that used in some EOS cameras.
Like: The LCD is brilliant, akin to the competing Epson storage device. Photos and movies show exceptional detail and saturated colour even when viewed from slightly off-centre. The M80 is easy to use and for a Canon EOS SLR owner every control will look immediately familiar. File transfer speed from memory card to hard drive is excellent*.
Dislike: The excellent LCD! The Canon shares a paradoxical problem with the Epson equivalent – the image on the LCD is so good that it makes decisions about what to delete and what to keep difficult. Because of the small size, exceptional sharpness and detail of the LCD image every photo, even an out of focus shot, looks a winner. This is a strange complaint, but take it as a word of advice.
Verdict: This is a nicely designed and made portable storage device, but it is expensive for a gadget that really only does one thing. A notebook computer is more versatile, providing not only storage on the move but internet connection and general computer processing. The M80 would make sense for a professional who uses it every day but it doesn’t represent value for money for the occasional tourist. On the other hand, if money were no object, we would buy one.
*This was written after downloading 30 images from an SD card. The experience was different when we later backed up 200 images from a CF card -- then the transfer rate was annoyingly slow.
Posted by terry at September 6, 2007 02:15 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1356