Field Tests

Jobo Giga Vu Pro Evolution

Image management and media back-up on location is something we all have to take seriously now. Until recently, I was pretty happy to commit everything to my Apple  iBook with a portable hard drive in support, and five 2GB memory cards covered me for a full day in the field pretty much anywhere. But now British airport security restrictions insist on only one item of hand baggage you really have to examine where you can make reductions. And there are some trips where you don’t want to have to be worried about a laptop as well as all your camera gear – say on safari in Africa or India. Which is why I came to look around for the current best portable storage options.

Not so long ago, the portable devices available to us seemed to be pretty crude and unreliable. There were tales of batteries draining before a single card had completely downloaded, hard drive failure was not uncommon, and if there was a screen on the thing you still couldn’t view raw files. Then came the Epson P2000 and at last we had a serious piece of hardware. Now Epson’s new range has some competition in the shape of the Jobo Giga Vu Pro Evolution (except for the catchy name), and I recently had the opportunity to try out the 40GB version in testing field conditions – an expedition to South Georgia and the Antarctic.

Some basic data. The unit measures 14.5 x 11 x 4 cm and weighs in at 410g, so it’s pretty compact and manageable, comfortably slipping into my coat pocket. The 4-inch colour display of  280 candela and screen dimensions of 640 x 480 pixels beats anything on the market for brightness and resolution. There are three models available with different storage capacities: 40, 80, and 120 GB. Typical UK prices are £379, £499 and £599 respectively.

My first impression is that this feels like a professional piece of kit. The smooth-contoured, rubberised casing persuades me of its ruggedness and ability to withstand a few knocks, and the ergonomics are faultless. It all seems familiar and easy, for example the way the lid neatly inverts to provide a base as it exposes the screen and controls. I am now faced with the impressively large viewing screen, surrounded by a number of soft keys and buttons, and I see that there is a built-in slot for compact flash (CF) card direct downloads, plus two mini USB ports. [NB Other types of memory card have to input through an adapter, sold separately.] Switch on, and the unit comes to life in a couple of seconds. The display is presenting me with information about battery life, the amount of free disk space, and options for photos, movies or music. I disregard the movies and music – if I wanted that I’d buy an iPod. The first thing to check is how much storage space is there really available on a unit claiming to be 40GB? Well, not bad at all at 39.5GB (the other 0.5 GB being taken up with the manufacturer’s supplied sample files – perhaps you can delete them, but I didn’t try). I play with the controls for a while to see where it takes me; the more I can do without reference to the manual, the more I think the design is well thought-out and intuitive. Navigation is straightforward; you always seem to be made aware of which key to press, where to go next or how to go back. So far, so good.

I try downloading a full Sandisk Extreme III 2 GB CF card. At room temperature, the time required to fully download and verify was 4 minutes and 17 seconds. Well that’s more than adequate for me -  it’s about the same time it takes to download to my iBook using a Belkin card reader and USB2 lead. I can’t imagine a situation where I would be able to fill another card on the camera before the first became available again. The battery level indicator now shows 93% which sounds promising – surely I’d be able to dump at least ten cards (20 GB) before I’d need to re-charge the unit? Actually, that’s only true as long as you don’t review any images on battery power alone, so you have to be aware of that and manage according to your needs, but it’s a hefty working capacity.

Reviewing images is also very straightforward. You press the button that says “photos”, select the album you want using the nifty joystick control, and then opt for viewing pictures, thumbs, slideshow, etc. The full screen view is impressively bright and clear, and colours seem realistic with a wide gamut and good tonal gradation – though you can only really appreciate this indoors and not in daylight conditions. Scrolling through a series of raw files is almost instantaneous, but every few frames it has to slow down to think for a couple of seconds. I found it quite difficult to judge critical sharpness, (not as reliable as on the laptop) but you could reject the worst offenders with confidence and proceed with your crude editing. And you do have a zoom option; it took me 2 minutes and 25 seconds to effect this on a single raw file, so I gave that up as a bad job. To double-check exposure you can call up the histogram which fortunately is much quicker. Deleting images is a two-stage process via a recycle bin, so you needn’t worry too much about making a mistake as you flick through your work and consign some pictures to the bin. At the end of a trip, it’s a simple matter to connect to your PC and copy your image folders across. No firewire options here regrettably. The USB2 connection required about 45 minutes to transfer a full 40 GB to my desktop PC, but by then I wasn’t in a particular hurry.

Out in the field, the unit coped well with being tossed around in a bouncy zodiac and I experienced no corrupt files, missing folders or hardware failure. I confess I didn’t measure card download times when I was preoccupied with photographing penguins, but on no occasion was I conscious of this being a limiting factor. Summer temperatures in the Antarctic were rarely below zero so it wasn’t the most rigorous of all possible tests, yet I felt the Jobo performed well for me; basically it did everything I needed it to do without fuss and allowed me to get on with my photography in confidence.

Strengths

• Robust construction and durability.

• Beautifully designed, intuitive, and simple to operate.

• The large, bright viewing screen is a joy to look at, without flattering your images.

• The battery holds charge well and easily covers a heavy day’s shooting.

• Card transfer speeds are more than fast enough, coming well under the 5-minute mark for a 2 GB card.

Weaknesses

• I found the (British) mains adapter to be of flimsy construction, and half way through my trip the plug came apart in my hand when trying to disconnect from the socket in my cabin. This could have been a serious setback on a small ship in the large Southern Ocean, but fortunately I was able to make a temporary repair with some gaffer tape.

• Album naming is fairly straightforward, but I couldn’t use a standard date format for new albums which would increment automatically – which meant re-naming every album afterwards to integrate with my personal filing system. A minor point, and fairly easily worked around.

• Zooming in on raw files is so painfully slow it’s really not a practical tool. But this isn’t even an option on any similar device, so let’s not be too critical.

• A major disappointment for me was not being able to back up from the Giga Vu to a LaCie Rugged 120 GB portable hard drive which I already owned, even with a mains adapter for the LaCie unit. They tell me you can back up to other mass storage devices and definitely to the Jobo Giga One, but it’s not quite as versatile as I would have wished.

Tips for users

• Turn the automatic caching “off” to maximise storage space.

• Conserve battery power by only reviewing images on mains power wherever possible.

• Keep your albums down to a compact and manageable size, say less than 100 images, and use the “go to” command or the fast forward function on the joystick to get at buried files.

Conclusion

Probably the best in its class. I must stress that I haven’t carried out comparative field tests of the Epson competitors, but many other reviews echo that opinion. It handles all of the essential functions well, the design is outstanding, and it’s man enough for the job. Value for money? At the price of a low end laptop with much reduced functionality I suspect many will find it just too expensive for their needs, but there’s very little choice if you want a compact, fast and reliable device that offers the reassurance of displaying your raw images. And it’s much handier to take down the pub.

Further information