Customer Reviews

JOBO ImageMaestro PRO Portable DVD Burner, Card Reader & Media Player JIM-001

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If you are on a long photographic trip you will inevitably fill up your memory cards. I bought this instead of the more popular harddrive type backup because it can make multiple copies. If the harddrive in your harddrive backup were to fail or your harddrive backup was stolen, you would lose all the images from your trip. With the Jobo burner, I make 2 DVDs or CDs and keep them in separate places.

The unit is well built. The slim drive is removable so it can be replaced if it broke in the future. DVD Burning is slow, so using it in the field is not that practical. I don't think the battery would last more than a few burns. I burned my DVDs in the evening in my hotel room.

You can show your images on a TV. It can even advance them automatically for a slide-show. Unfortunately, the zoom is too limited. I was hoping to be able to check the focus of my images, but I could not. A remote control is also included. It will also play DVD movies.

I comes with a nice case, but it is a bit larger than I had imagined. The A/C converter, remote, and all the cables take up more space than I thought. But, it is still much smaller than a laptop.

The first thing I found out is that it doesn't support higher than 2Gb memory cards. I have a 4Gb in my camera, it won't read it. So I bought two 2GB SD mem cards, it reads them nicely.

Before I bought mine I had read quite a few reviews, elsewhere, with lots of problems with the burner, and I'm having the same problems. Most CDs burned with the JOBO ImageMaestro PRO are unreadable on a PC. But 'most' of them are readable in the ImageMaestro, so by connecting it to the PC via the USB as a removable drive you can transfer your images to the PC. Then burn them to CD or DVD from the PC and throw away the one burned by the ImageMaestro. Burning your new CD or DVD from the PC using the ImageMaestro results in a good burn that is readable in any PC. Which leads me to believe the drive in the ImageMaestro is fine, it's the firmware causing the problems.

Backing your photos to DVD fails 100% of the time. It says it's burning them.. and if I look real hard I can see that somthing has been burned to the DVD.. but it won't read in the ImageMaestro or a PC. Again, if you burn a DVD on it from the PC with Nero or simular the result is fine, so the drive is fine.. the firmware is weak.

So if one sticks to using only CDs and not DVDs, and using a TV to view and verify the photos are actually on the CD BEFORE deleting them from the camera.. then this is a usefull tool. But out in the field without a way to view and verify, it's just too unreliable to trust that your valuable photos have really been saved to a readable disc. If a CD is unreadable by the ImageMaestro throw the CD away and try again. Usually the second or third attempt will burn a readable CD. This didn't work for me with DVDs, no matter how many times I tried it never burned a readable photo DVD.

The card reader seems reliable, though doesn't support cards larger than 2Gb. I've only tried Compact Flash and Secure Digital mem in it, it worked fine with those. The DVD drive seems reliable and will play DVDs my PC has problems with. It is fairly rugged construction, and the burner is replacable with a standard laptop burner. It's a real nice unit all except it's burning firmware is very weak.

I am still happy with mine for the $130 I paid for it. I don't think I'd be so happy if I had paid the retail price $374.95 for it though.

- 2007.07.29 Addendum -
The more I used the JOBO ImageMaestro PRO the more I've realized just how unreliable it is, even burning CDs. Even hooking it to a PC via USB to burn CDs or DVDs from a computer produces bad burns. I have lost thousands of photographs thinkng they were safely burned to CDs, to find out later that only a few photos were actually readable. This product is a great idea, but the failure rate burning CD and DVD is very high. If you value your photographs don't use the JOBO ImageMaestro PRO.