Review Jobo Giga One

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Darren
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There are a few portable hard drive/storage devices out now that give you 40gb for less than £100 and I've been using the Jobo for about a week.

To start with the unit comes packaged like a quality item with the drive, a lead and the charger. All very nice and simple and that's the Giga One through and through.

It should be ready to go straight out of the box, even came fully charged but I did have a problem with this unit. It's a card reader as well as a hard drive and that's all I could get from mine. I could read cards through it but as far as two PC's and a couple of MAC's were concerned, no drive.

I spoke to Jobo tech support to see if there was something I had missed but apparently, it's not unheard of for these to be DOA. I was told a lose terminal connection was usually to blame and while easy enough to fix was not something I could do. Well not being too bright and and unable to refuse a dare...... off came the back. :whistle2:

Inside the hard drive connects just as it does in any PC and this one just wasn't pushed home. Good to know how it goes together as recovery via a PC would be very simple if the rest of the unit dies with shots on the drive.

So, working 100% I took it off to Castle Combe to see how it worked in the field. A very cold and muddy field.

Simplicity is the name of the game here. The LCD shows battery level, hard drive gb's remaining, type of card connected with data captured amount (999mb max display though) percentage of transfer and when USB connection is present.

There are two buttons, off/on and copy. That's it, you stick the card in and press the button. Connect to a PC and it shows as a drive with each card downloaded in it's own folder. It goes against the grain to trust a device that tells you so little but so far, it's been 100% perfect.

When you think that it's a few quid more than 2gb of flash memory, it makes a compelling argument for itself.

Oh and it downloads a 2gb card in about 8 minutes.
 
This looks seriously tempting - as you say its soo low in price, I think I'll start counting my pennies.

Thanks for the review:thumb:
 
The specs say 3.5 to 4 gb but I think that relates to an older version as I've read reviews where people have downloaded over 8gb on a charge and I had 4gb and still 75% charge remaining.
 
I kinda know what you mean, in a way there is little point having a bigger hard drive than you can fill on a battery charge. On the other hand though, I don't often shoot more than 10gb without the opportunity to download/charge up again so it works well enough for me.
 
A spare battery for that one is about £11 so it's worth buying a couple if you're going to have a need.
 
Just ordered the P-2000 version from Epson !

Mainly because I want to double it up as an album type viewer for family/friends etc ... saves printing everything off and then filing away ! I can just print any pics people require and archive the rest ! But I also want to be sure I can download pics whilst on holidays without the hassle of trailing a PC with us !

Seemed like a reasonable idea to me anyway so I know where Dazzajl is coming from !
 
Venomator said:
Just ordered the P-2000 version from Epson !
Worth noting that it doesnt support progressive JPEGs so if you have saved them all that way then you will have to convert.

Mark
 
mfwild13 said:
Worth noting that it doesnt support progressive JPEGs so if you have saved them all that way then you will have to convert.

Mark

Cheers Mark - useful tip to remember !
 
apparently nexto are a good one to go for...a little expensive but very fast and last a while.
 
Nice review, I have one of these drives as well and have found no problems with it at all,
 
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