How do you like your pictures stored? Small and neat? Easily viewable? Well, Digital Foci, a digital photography accessories company, recently announced the expansion of three of its leading products into the European market in 2011. They’ve three offerings, which they hope will cover the various needs of anyone who takes photos. Let’s have a closer look.
Picture Porter 35
The Picture Porter 35 is a portable photo manager that comes in 250GB and 500GB capacities. Marketed as a portable hard drive for use during vacations or on photo shoots, this 5.4 inch storage device features a memory card reader with a 1GB per 90 seconds transfer rate and a 3.5 inch color LCD screen to view your photos on. It also supports RAW images as well as various music and video formats.
While it may have two features that most portable drives do not (LCD screen and memory card reader), the availability of countless other drives with twice the capacity (1TB) at one third of the price ($170) **cough** Western Digital **cough** makes me wonder if those features are really needed. If it does float your boat, though, expect to pay somewhere around $399 for a 250GB one and $499 for 500GB. (There aren’t any European prices yet.)
Photo Safe II
The Photo Safe, at $159 or $219
Okay, so the Picture Porter 35 may be a little pricey for what you get. Well then, the Photo Safe II is your solution. Also available in 250GB ($159) and 500GB ($219) capacities, the Photo Safe II can be seen as the Picture Porter’s little brother with a length of only 4.6 inches. It also supports most memory card types and transfers 1GB in 3.5 minutes. But again, with many other competitors offering more storage capacity for cheaper, price is something to consider here.
Photo Book
Can the iPad do this better?
One of Digital Foci’s hottest sellers in the U.S. for 2009, the Photo Book is a digital portfolio album for photographers to showcase their photos. The Photo Book comes with 4GB of memory, available in two different versions: a “Wedding” version (Pearl White) or a “Professional” version (Black). All for $189.
The device is ideal for wedding photographers (or other professionals) to display their portfolios to potential clients, or for non-professionals to simply show off their vacation pics to friends and family. While the Photo Book may be suitable for such purposes, the success of Apple’s iPad combined with the future release of upcoming touch tablets may make photographers think twice before buying this glorified digital frame. For just a few hundred more dollars, you could buy an iPad with no ugly buttons and a beautiful 10-inch touch display, not to mention the bajillion other things (video, music, apps, email, time-traveling) it can do.
What do you think then? It seems as if you’ve got to be able to offer something really special to be able to crack this market.