We’ve all had this problem. You’re out at Sea World and you’re taking a gazillion pictures of Shamu and you’re 4 GB Compact Flash card has only a handful pictures left when your wife says sweetly, “Hey honey, why don’t you take some pictures of the kids in the stands?” Mmm, delete Shamu or tell the wife you can’t? Ya, tough situation that once happened to me where I got in a heap of trouble for not deleting the hundreds of HO scale trains I took for a few pictures of our kids on the merry-go-round.

There have been a few solutions for this problem, namely dragging your laptop around with you and off load your pictures that way. But who wants to do that? Man, the diaper bag alone is big enough for me to want to ditch it immediately! Other portable hard drive readers, some with screen and some without, have slowly made there way into the alternative space. Of course, you can just buy more flash cards, too.

Digital Foci goes with the hard drive solution. Its new Photo Safe II accepts Compact Flash (including Extreme III, IV, UDMA), MMC, SD/HC Card, miniSD, Memory Stick, MS PRO, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, and xD-Picture card. Ya, pretty much everything. All the pictures are stored on either an 80GB or 160GB internal hard drive. Once you get home or to the hotel, then you can connect the Photo Safe II to your computer and off comes all those saved pictures of both Shamu and the kids!

Photo Safe II is easy to use and only requires pressing one button labeled “Auto Copy”. At speeds of 5.0/MBsec, a full 1GB card will be copied in about 3.5 minutes. All file formats, including RAW, are supported. A backlit LED screen gives information as to space left, copy progress, and battery life.

Photo Safe II works on both Macs and PCs and retails for $139 for the 80GB version and $189 for the larger 160GB drive.

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