LATEST ELECTRONIC GADGETZ

With the move from film to digital, professional photographers and serious hobbyists have had one more thing to carry in addition to their camera and lenses: a laptop. At the end of a busy day of shooting, you need to off-load your memory cards in preparation for the next day’s shoot. Digital Foci’s Picture Porter 35 portable photo manager, which will be shown at CES but isn’t due out until around mid-year, will help. This 12-ounce device combines a hard drive (in capacities starting at 160GB), a 3.5-inch color screen, a memory card reader, a rechargeable battery, and an array of ports.

Simply insert your camera’s memory card into the proper slot (the device accepts CF, MMC, SD/HC Card, miniSD, Memory Stick, MS Pro, MS Duo, and xD formats) and the unit will transfer the files at a rate of about 500MB per minute. The Picture Porter 35 supports JPEG, Tiff, BMP, GIF, and RAW image formats (the latter with zoom, EXIF, and histogram data), and MPEG-1, MPEG-4 SP, MJPEG video files. As for photo management, Picture Porter 35 lets you view, select, copy, rename, delete, and sort (by name or date) files, as well as create new folders—all the typical tasks you might do on a laptop.

The device’s USB-host function lets you connect an external hard drive for making secondary backups of critical photos or the entire drive. For personal and business use, a Playlist feature lets you create photo slideshows. Other features include audio playback (MP3, WMA, and AAC files are supported), a built-in speaker, an audio recorder with built-in mic, and audio and video jacks for connecting to a TV, projector or other display.