To digress a bit, personal storage devices seem to come in two basic flavors; those that offer image display, and those that do not. While the ability to display images in the field may offer benefits for some, I personally have little use for it. My personal opinion is that chimping in the field is not only a waste of time and might cause you to miss that once in a lifetime shot while you're futzing around with your PSD (or camera for that matter), but it's also a considerable drain on the battery in a class of device that already has a clouded reputation for battery life. Many PSDs that offer image viewing are limited to the display of jpeg, TIFF, or BMP files. The PSDs that offer RAW file support are often limited to a handful of proprietary formats. These units need to be upgraded via firmware to support new RAW formats as they come along. Life's too short. Do yourself a favor and sort through and look at your images on a full sized monitor at the end of the day as nature intended.
In this article we'll take a close look at the PD70x in several critical areas such as construction, ease of operation, performance in the field, memory card transfer rates, and of course that all important factor, battery life. The section on battery life will also contain voltage regulation data and battery charging figures. I'll also cover the PD70x's operation as an external drive and card reader among other features.
While this review will compare certain aspects of the PD70x to the PD7x from time to time, this is not designed to be a comparison review. It's a PD70x review, and it would take far too much time to compare all aspects of both units head to head. The following 'What's New' section is the one exception to this.
What's New:
Although the PD7x and PD70x share a great deal in common, there are quite a few changes in the PD70x, some of which are obvious, and some that are not.
The first thing you'll notice about the PD70x exterior is that it's completely devoid of buttons. It's as if someone finally designed a PSD where you ceremoniously wave the memory card over the unit and the files magically appear on the hard drive. It's not quite that easy yet, but I'll bet we see some Wi-Fi PSDs in the near future. In place of the four buttons that were on the PD7x is a multi-function wheel that is hidden under the memory card door. All PD70x operations are performed using this wheel.
There are now dual DC-to-DC regulators to take full advantage of battery capacity and to offer dedicated power for MicroDrive support. The battery charger circuitry has also been beefed-up to 900ma which also uses a more sophisticated charging algorithm.
There is now an on-board DMA processor for card to drive transfers. EastGear advertises the PD7x as a 33x device and the PD70X as a 66x device. What the 33x and 66x refer to is anybodies guess, but the data buss speed on the PD70x is 16MB where the PD7x's data buss was 5MB. All I can tell you is the PD70x is fast! More on that in the 'Performance' section.
The PD70x has become more autonomous in that you can now perform firmware updates from a memory card and format the hard drive drive without the need of a computer. It also supports FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 memory card formats.
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