ImageTank by Level Technologies

Today's digital cameras offer amazing quality photos.  And with that quality, come the demands for amazing amounts of storage space for each photo.  With a 6MP camera, it's easy to fill a 1 Gig Compact Flash card in under an two hours.  At $250 per card, the costs add up.  A two-week trip could break the bank. 

My preferred solution is to transfer my images to a laptop at night.  But there are times when that doesn't suffice.  A heavy day of shooting would require 5 gigs of storage to make it through the day.  Lugging a laptop can be a chore.  And they require power.  

Enter the image tank.  It is essentially a laptop hard drive wrapped with slots for digital cards.  It accepts both Smart Media and Compact Flash, and operates on wall, car, and even battery power. Files are transferred to a PC using a standard USB 1.0 connection.

In they go... Insert the media card, turn on the power, and push the button.  Watch the icons flicker for five minutes while the device does it's work.  When finished, it will automatically shut itself down.  For each copy operation, it places the files in a new sequentially-named folder.

And out they come... Plug the ImageTank into your Windows PC, and it should automatically recognize it as a new drive.

To USB, or not to USB?  In considering a purchase, your first decision will be whether or not USB 1.0 will be fast enough for your purposes. If you don't give enough thought initially, you'll have plenty of additional time later, as you wait for your files to transfer over the slow USB connection.  One gig of images will require about twenty minutes.  If the ImageTank had USB 2.0 or Firewire 1394 connections, the files would transfer in under a minute.  Initially, I didn't think the slow performance would concern me -- I have other things to do while it copies, I thought.  But I frequently find myself waiting.  The connection is also too slow to reasonably preview images using XP's views, which is something I like to do when I'm going back to find files I never transferred to my PC.

Delete should delete!  I have empty folders on my ImageTank that windows simply refuses to delete.  It says they are in use.  Not all folders.  Just some.  Months of copies and reboots haven't corrected the situation.  Search me.

All, or nothing.  The ImageTank just copies files. It doesn't have any intelligence to it. If you forget to erase your card between shoots, it will create new copies of those images.

You did actually copy the files this time, right?  Shortly after receiving my ImageTank, I ran into a problem while using it to copy files from my Canon Elph.  Insert card, press button, watch minutes of flicker.  Unplug card, look for files.  No luck.  Reformatting the card in the camera corrected the problem.  But it doesn't tell me what happened.  And worse, how am I supposed to trust the ImageTank in the field.  I'm gun-shy.

Power, then cable, the card.  Or was it cable, then card, then power?  The ImageTank is precariously picky about when certain functions will work.  You can't copy files while it is connected to the PC.  It won't recognize a card unless you insert it before turning on the power.  You can't connect to the PC if a card is still in the slot.  To get it to turn off, you have to unplug it.  Odd-ball.

Battery Power Powering the unit in the field is accomplished by a cheesy plastic contraption that takes six AA batteries. Despite appearances, it functions quite well using my high-output NiMH rechargeable batteries.  I've never tried any others, or seen what happens when the batteries run low.  

Show me what you've got! Um, no.  There is no image preview.  There is no battery indicator.  There is no space indicator.  The LCD is a proprietary job whose only job is to show three icons -- HD, SmartMedia, and CompactFlash.

You get what you pay for. I'm not entirely happy with my ImageTank.  If I had it to do over again, I would have gone with a unit that at least shows me available drive space.  I'm not sure I would have gone so far as Nexview Vista, but I would have gone for something more.


  List Price: $250
  Street Price: $120 (and dropping)