We initially were not planning on taking a laptop, so was looking at my other options. Of course ordered the download device prior to the weight increase, so have that regardless. But now we are considering taking the laptop. It with the stuff basically weights in at 12 lbs (bag and all), so it was out of the question before.
The good digital camera takes compact flash cards, so there were several choices available for portable download options. Not necessarily the cheapest option, but we ended up with a FlashTrax. It is an overgrown mp3 player, but also designed as a downloadable photo storage device. It (the one I got) has a 30gig hard drive for storage and has a 2 1/2 inch lcd screen and it will actually show you your pictures. That was the turning point for Carol, in that she wanted to know that the pictures were there before erasing the flash card. There are some downloadable devices that will take a variety of flash card, but many of them will not show you the picture.
Regardless of if we take the laptop now or not, will take that gizmo regardless, as it will probably last longer under battery power than the laptop, as it really is a single function device for how we are going to use it. Then will probably sell it upon our return, as I don't really think we will have a long term need for it. The Flashtrax does have an option to take other types of media (with an adapter) if you camera is not a compact flash card. When comparing the prices, given the number of cards were were going to have to buy it was a simple choice. Also I got a refurbished one with factory warranty for basically 1/2 off the retail price, so that helped a lot also. If you use compact flash I can tell you where you can get it.
Our other digital (backup) camera uses a different media and same with the camcorder that I am going to get. But if we take the laptop, then I have a multi card reader/writer that I can use to download to the laptop. But the battery in the laptop is getting a little long in the tooth and is probably due for a replacement. That would then maybe help with the battery life. Can recharge things at the camps, but the camera battery recharging will come first if that becomes an issue.
But with your husband being the team photographer, then I imagine he is going to be taking tons of photos and not worrying about deletion of photos on site. Then a storage device of some nature would be important. I checked out several different storage devices but ended up settling on the flashtrax for various reasons, and one of the main ones, was being able to at least see a couple of the pictures on the LCD screen before we erased the compact flash card. I know it sounds paranoid, but we lost basically all of our rolls of film (Carols previous film SLR) when coming back from Tahiti. X-Ray machine -- (not long after 9/11) and they would not allow anything at that time to not go through the big high powered x-ray machines. Nobody had any film that basically survived. We had taken a digital camera with us at the time, but were taking low resolution for the web mainly, so they survived fine. But we really were not able to get any prints. Was able to work some stuff with my editing software and did get some prints, but we also did not take as many photos with it and so missed a lot. Even with my editing software it takes about an hour or so per picture to try to fix the damage done by the x-ray machine and it was just too much. So now we are all digital and hope that we can survived the battery recharges! <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/Laugh.gif" alt="" /> Going to take along some extra rechargable battery packs for the various cameras and make sure that everything is completely and fully charged once we leave Jberg. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/Grin.gif" alt="" />
