The Sanho Hyperdrive Album has garnered occasional mention in this forum, principally (if not solely) as a useful tool for backing up your camera memory cards in the field (i.e., away from a computer) and also being able view on its 4.8 inch screen the photos you’ve taken in both RAW and JPEG formats. It doesn’t entirely deliver in these regards without some annoying (to me) limitations, but it does for the most part, and I will shortly touch on a few of them. But that is not my intent, which is instead to share some of the additional potentials I have “discovered” it has for further use to digital photographers. And, in any case, some of the flaws (as I see them) may well be addressed in future firmware upgrades by the Sanho engineering team.
The additional usefulness I have found derives from its really basic hardware, which is essentially a casing for laptop hard drives of whichever capacity you choose up to about 750 GB (I’ve elected one of 500GB). And the casing the hard drive easily slides into contains the LCD screen, operating system and controls. If you buy the Album with a hard drive included, it’s rather pricey, but I bought a used casing off of Ebay and bought the hard drive for $50 at Office Depot.
Briefly, the “flaws” (or quirks, rather) I found that initially inhibited my full satisfaction stemmed principally from the camera(s) I chose to use, and the type of photos I was interested in taking. At the time of my purchase a month or so ago, I found to my surprise that not all camera manufacturers’ RAW formats are handled by the Album. They weren’t for my three Panasonic Lumix cameras, but they were for my Sony’s SR2 RAW format. Two of my three Lumix cameras employed the RW2 RAW format and the third, an older model, utilized the Panasonic RAW format, none of which converted (displayed) initially in the Album. I got in touch with Sanho customer service, which was very forthcoming and shortly their engineering team solved the RW2 problem, but as of this date not yet for the older Panasonic RAW format. But the solution to the RW2 problem did not entirely provide the usefulness I required, nor did the seemingly problem-free accommodation of the Album to the Sony RAW format.
And this was due to my quite particular needs. I program my cameras to produce black-and-white JPEG images, but I expect the companion RAW images to be simultaneously displayed in their natural color. But, strangely enough, this doesn’t (yet) occur with the Album. When I designate black-and-white for my JPEG, I get a BLACK-AND-WHITE photo in the RAW format! I’ve queried customer support about this, and they seem to regard the disparity (to me) as what is to be expected. Anyway, I do hope they’re working on this aspect as well, but I’m not confident of a resolution.
The other aspect I was hoping to be able to utilize the Album for (to be able to use it as a “true” photographic album) was to be able to load on it the photos I’d edited in Phototshop which are in the TIFF format. However, the Album regrettably doesn’t handle TIFF.
So, let me briefly(!) relate to you what “adjustments” I’ve made to date to accommodate my requirements. They are a bit cumbersome, but they work, for the most part. I’ve converted all my RAW format to the Adobe DNG format (using the free Adobe DNG Converter) which allows my black-and-white JPEG photos to appear in the Album alongside the DNG-converted photos which appear in their natural color. And I’ve converted my edited TIFF photos to JPEG using a format converter (in my case the fairly inexpensive ReaConverter Lite) which also has a mechanism for simultaneously producing thumbnails, which the Album (again mysteriously) doesn’t provide for JPEG images not produced by itself.
And there you have it, for what it’s worth. I don’t even know if our forum can accommodate a posting of this length, but I’ll give it a try.
