This’ll probably never get answered (as it is quite an unusual question) but it’s worth a try…
I have a digital camera with a USB connection. When the USB camera is plugged in an extra drive appears in windows explorer
I have just bought a 128MB memory card for it. I was wondering if anyone knows if I can use the camera as a portable storage device?
Say, for instance, I download a trailer that is 100MB. could I put it into the camera memory, take it somewhere else, and put it on the computer?
My camera is a fuji finepix 2600. the memory is smartmedia, the connection is USB. I want to transfer files from an NT machine to an ME machine.
If it shows up as a drive in Explorer, it should work just fine.
The only thing to watch out for is that sometimes the cameras are a bit sensitive to where stuff is on the card. For instance, my Fuji expects a “DCIM” directory, and it will require the card to be reformatted if you delete that. So don’t mess with what’s there already, and you should be fine.
These cards will work fine for that purpose. That’s what they were designed for! Many new smart devices, including PDAs take flash, smartmedia, or SD cards for additional storage. When my company develops applications for smart devices, we distribute on these cards.
I don’t use the camera as a storage device, but use the cards as evilhans said to transfer data from one PC to another. A USB card reader is really handy.
Well I have managed to do half the job so far. I’ve filled a 128MB smartmedia card with some of the huge demos at www.nvidia.com . soon I will be at home and will be able to finish the job.
I use my camera because I already had the camera when I got the idea. It saves buying a card reader. and it works just as well.
It still amazes me that you can fit so much onto something not much bigger than a stamp and as thin as a credit card!
You can get floppy-disk adapters for SmartMedia. After installing the drivers, you can just put the flash card into this thing that looks like a floppy disk, and access it just like your regular A: drive on computers with no USB connection.
CompactFlash is even cooler. Since the CF cards have built-in circuitry to emulate an IDE hard drive, you can get adapters that make the CF card look like a regular hard drive… and they’re cheap because the adapters have virtually no electronic components. Just don’t try to take the card out while it’s attached to the IDE interface.
No problem. Here is a SmartMedia floppy adapter, and here is a CompactFlash IDE adapter.
(They say the CF/IDE adapter is ideal for Linux, but with version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, you have to give the ‘hdX=flash’ kernel option if you want to put a CF device on the same IDE channel as any other device.)
just a note, the floppy adapter for CFII cards (and sony MemorySticks, and SmartMedia cards) is horribly, awfully, depressingly slow. Slower than serial, even. And, you have to have drivers on a floppy to use the FDA.
As opposed to USB card readers - newer OS’s come with drivers for some of them so it really is plug and play - or, as someone else mentioned, PCMCIA dapters for CFII cards, all windows 9x and upwards recognise these devices as a removable HDD, which means they are great for moving data between laptops.
I am glad you posted Abby. I was wondering if the floppy adapter card would be as slow as normal floppy data transfer.
It took about 2 minutes to transfer about 100MB onto my smartmedia card. my colleague at work was putting a split up file onto floppies (about 30MB) that took hours! I suspect the floppy adapter would take an hour for 100MB. Am I right?
Just had a couple on an around the world trip hang out at my flat for 4 days. They used their Sony with a 64 meg card to transfer between their small screen laptops and my desktops. did all sorts of editing on my desktop, uploaded to their website, and then transfer back changes to their laptop. Worked real well and pretty quickly. They have been doing this with their data for two years now.
