Data Transfer: Card/stick to camera's internal HD. Why not standard?

Factual Questions
1

After attending a graduation this weekend, there were several people with digital cameras, all taking our own sets of photos. I’m the geek among them, so I plan to collect them all and post them. Unfortunately, this means waiting for everyone to get home, upload, and send them to me.

Now, obviously, there’s a lot of different storage cards and sticks in use, but several of the cameras used SD cards, which is what I use. I’d like to be able to wait until the end of the day, put my friend’s card in my camera, save them to my camera’s internal memory, and give him his card back. This way, when I get home, I have all of my pictures, as well as his, all ready to be cropped and published.

I’m sure by now some cameras have this ability, but it seems like a no-brainer that this would be a standard option in even the most basic of cameras with expansion abilities.

Possible reasons:
Data transfer eats up battery life. (Yeah, but so does everything else.)
Cameras’ internal HDs are generally smaller than that of cards. (We’ve been dealing with storage issues for years now, what’s so difficult to deal with here that it’s not even an option? I’d assume one could pick and choose which pictures would be copied.)
Piracy prevention, like on iPods. (Of all the way to pirate software/music/whatever, why would anyone use a digital camera?)

I use a Kodak EasyShare CX6330, and I used to have the CX4200 model. Neither could transfer data between internal and card.

2

What do yo mean by “internal HD”? Most cameras have no other storage device other than the removable flash memory.

I have a Kodak DC265, and I can transfer pictures from one camera to another over an infrared link.

3

I’ve never seen a digital camera with a HD. What they do have in addition to the card is a small amount of internal memory, but no more than enough to hold maybe 2 pictures. It’s just a buffer, so you can take a few pictures quickly without having to wait to write them each to your flash card.

4

No, Troy McClure SF is not talking about the buffer. Some cameras (usually bottom of the range ones) do have a certain amount of internal memory, usually 8 or 16 MBs.

5

Both of my cameras have had respectable internal storage capacities. Looking at the CX6330 now, it has room for fifty ~800x600 pictures on the internal drive alone. I’m good about clearing off photos once I upload them, so this storage hasn’t been a problem for me. I didn’t know it was common not to have unternal memory. Yet another thing I like about this camera. :slight_smile:

But anyway, why wouldn’t, well, anything with an internal drive and room for expansion have a built-in transfer process?

6

“Unternal memory”?

Must be a Zombie camera.

7

You want something like this: http://www.vosonic.co.uk/vp2060.html

They go for about $100 online from a quick google and they can store as much as the biggest laptop harddrive you can fit in there and can read practically any card format. It’s useful if your on long photo shoots without having to buy absurd amounts of memory cards.

8

Or a laptop and one of those cheap 96-in-one memory card readers.

9

This amount is tiny. Pictures at 600x800 are just barely good enough to be used on the web, you wouldn’t be able to print out anything passable with that. Cameras come with small amounts of memory for a variety of reasons, mainly as an internal buffer but they also work as storage. The problem is that if you take full size images, you can only hold a few shots at best.

I carry about 1/2 gig of memory cards with me. There’s no point building that into the camera.