DIGITAL CAMERAS Product adds photo storage space

FlashTrax can also store and play music in MP3 format.
By RON HARRIS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
SAN FRANCISCO -- With digital photography enjoying a steady rise, now's a good time for a device that can provide loads of portable disk space for storing photos on the go.
With the $500 FlashTrax from Fort Myers, Fla.-based SmartDisk Corp., you can transfer your digital photos, clear the camera's memory card and start fresh. Better still, you can view photos through FlashTrax's full-color, 3.5-inch LCD screen.
I took a short tour of San Francisco with my 4 megapixel Canon S400 digital camera, a 32 megabyte flash card and FlashTrax in tow.
At the camera's highest resolution settings, I could snap about 30 shots before I needed FlashTrax. Slightly bigger than a personal digital assistant, FlashTrax has 30 gigabytes of storage, enough for about 30,000 photos at that same quality.
All I had to do was flip the display panel on FlashTrax, power it on and insert the CompactFlash card from the camera in the front slot. An adaptor sold separately lets the unit read other types of flash memory cards, such as Sony's Memory Stick.
Display screen
There's a nice four-directional thumb pad to surf the display screen. I highlighted the correct folder, and with one press of the "copy" button, the flash card contents were transferred. Too easy.
The display screen gives thumbnail shots along with file names -- handy since cameras assign user-unfriendly names like "IMG--0430." To view one, I just scrolled down, highlighted it and pressed enter. There's also a neat slideshow option for viewing stills.
FlashTrax can also store and play music in MP3 format.
When FlashTrax connected to my home PC by way of USB 2.0, the unit appeared as a removable hard drive under "My Computer." Sweet! It only took 10 seconds to transfer an entire album of MP3s (42 megabytes in this case).
The sound quality is fine through the onboard speaker, but even better through quality headphones. The audio-playing software is good and the control buttons on the side were intuitive.
FlashTrax can also play "motion JPEG" files, the small video snippets recordable with most digital still cameras. I found this feature useless, since the quality of such video is low to begin with.
Product details
FlashTrax weighs 12 ounces and measures 5.6 inches by 3.6 inches, so it's by no means a vest pocket device. The manufacturer says the rechargeable battery lasts three hours for audio playback and two hours for viewing photos. I never ran out of juice during my day on the town.
The unit works with Windows 98 or higher or Apple OS 8.6 or higher and requires a USB port to connect to the home computer.
Lexar Media Inc. recently introduced a 4-gigabyte CompactFlash card, for $1,499. FlashTrax could be an appealing alternative at $500, though many people might choose to shell out several hundred bucks more for a laptop with similar storage capacity, a much bigger screen and the ability to edit photos on the go.
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