Customer Reviews

Belkin Digital Camera Link for iPod 3G (White)

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

You take your iPod everywhere you go. You'd think it'd be the perfect place to store your photos. For the time being, I'd recommend finding another solution.

For one, this device is slow. This is not terribly surprising given that it transfers via USB, but still it's very slow. And because the iPod is spending all of this time writing to its HD, a transfer will completely drain the iPod's battery (and probably your camera's).

Your photos will appear on your iPod as opaque "rolls." The only way to verify that all of your pictures have transferred is to compare the picture count on the iPod to that on your camera.

I knew of these limitations when I bought the product, so none of these were disappointing (though my wife was surprised at how clunky a process it was).

The frustration came when, halfway into our month-long vacation, the Camera Link was convinced my iPod was full and refused to make any more transfers. When I checked, my iPod had 4 GB free. I tried transferring from my camera. I tried from my wife's. Nothing. The device suddenly became a useless brick.

After a bit of panicking, we found a department store with kiosks that would copy your memory card to a CD. This is, IMO, a much better solution. It was faster to walk to the store, insert the memory card, and burn a CD than to stay in the hotel room and wait for this thing to work. Cheaper, too. Next vacation, I'll just do that.

The Belkin Digital Camera Link is to date the best way to back up photos directly from your digital camera to your iPod. I use my DCL with a 20GB 4G iPod, and it works well. Because it relies on USB 1.1, transfers are not as fast as a FireWire card reader plugged into my G4, but the speed is respectable.

You plug the DCL into the iPod, then you plug in your camera. Once the camera is ready, press the button on the DCL and the LEDs on the front start an animation which indicates that it's transferring. When the animation stops, the transfer is complete. If the LEDs turn red, theres a problem. Only turned red for me when I tried a MicroDrive in a card reader (see below).

This works well on my Canon PowerShot S50. It also worked with a CompactFlash card plugged into a generic USB card reader. It did not work with an IBM MicroDrive. It transfers photos and movies with no problem.

One fault: It doesn't remove the photos from the camera after downloading. You have to do that on the camera.

I found this product to work efficiently and exactly and described. It is truly 'plug-and-play' - plug it into your iPod, plug it into your camera, and press 1 button. Watch the indicator light as your files transfer - that is it! This gadget will also verify the files were transferred properly afterwards. I used this while on vacation and was able to fill my 256MB card up every day, download all my pictures at night, and go back to shooting more pictures the next day as if I had a brand new memory card. The transfer took only minutes AND it worked when my iPod and camera batteries had a very low charge. This is MUCH cheaper than purchasing additional memory cards. Once I got home and connected my iPod I was able to transfer my pictures to my PC in minutes. This is a sleek and very useful item especially when you want to take lots fo photos but do not have many memory cards or access to a PC to download them right away.

This device is useless if you have a Canon camera. I found out luckily the night before my vacation, and had time to buy a Wolverine 40 GB photo storage system that reads all memory cards. I wasted $$ on the Belkin. It worked with my Sony Cybershot, but not with the Canon Rebel or the Canon point and shoots. I'll never use it.

I thought this would be a great product for vacation photos. I like to save my pictures as full resolution and minimal compression so I fill up my memory card rather quickly. It'd be great to transfer the photos to my iPod so I could take thousands of pictures and not worry about running out of space.

Unfortunately, this product worked poorly the 2 or 3 times that it actually transferred pictures and then it stopped working altogether.

Don't waste your money on this item. I'd put my money toward a 1GB memory card.

I this device worked well with 3G ipods but not compatible with later models.

I guess I was hoping to be able to see the photos on the i-pod immediately following the transfer from camera to i-pod. Other than
that it did everything it claimed to do and nothing was lost in the
transfer. Very easy to use. Very good piece of equipment especially
if you like to take a lot of photos and space on camera or cards is
limited.

On a multi-day photo shoot, it's good to be able to transfer your photos from flash cards to your 3G iPod. The process is simple enough, but it's slow, very heavy on batteries, including the iPod itself, and you can't tell how many of the photos are processed until the process is complete.

But other than that, yes, it does move photos to the iPod directly from a camera, or a flash card reader.

I bought Belkin Digital Camera Link a few months ago and put it aside. When I finally tried to use it .. nothing. It's defective. I doesn't work AT ALL. And I'm not surprised bec. this is the 2nd time this has happened to me with a Belkin for ipod product (the other one was the fm transmitter). And, my daughter has the belkin battery backup for ipod .. and it also stopped working after less than 1 year. I refuse to buy another Belkin product!