Notes on the Belkin Digital Camera Link for iPod with Dock Connector.
Copyright © 2005-2007 NK Guy
http://photonotes.org/reviews/digital-camera-link/
You know how sometimes you buy a product that seems quite ingenious, convenient and clever? And then, after a moment’s thought you realize the product has this incredibly annoying Achilles heel which suggests that perhaps its designers hadn’t quite fully thought through how the product is going to be used?
Belkin’s clumsily though accurately named "Digital Camera Link for iPod with Dock Connector" is such a product.
The basic idea
The basic idea is good. Let’s say you’re off on holiday or out shooting in the field or whatever. You’re happily snapping away on your digital camera and find yourself running out of space on your memory card. What to do?
Well, your basic options are to, 1) carry a pile of memory cards with you, 2) carry a bulky laptop and transfer stuff onto the computer as you go, 3) buy a "picture wallet" type of device that lets you offload pictures from the camera onto a hard drive or 4) stop taking photographs.
But let’s say you’re listening to music on an iPod as you shoot. And, you think, the iPod is basically a music player wrapped around a hard drive - why can’t I use it to store photos as well? That’s the basic premise behind the Belkin device.
How it works
Belkin’s first product for getting digital photos onto an iPod was their iPod Media Reader. This device accepted a variety of different card types (CompactFlash I and II, SmartMedia, Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick and MultiMediaCard (MMC)) and transferred the contents to your iPod. Unfortunately the design was severely limited by two big problems. First, it was painfully slow in transferring the data, and second, it used 4 AAA batteries.
Belkin tried a slightly different approach with their Digital Camera Link for iPod with Dock Connector, which I’m going to call the DCL from hereon in. Instead of removing your memory card you simply plug your camera into the DCL’s USB port and then plug the iPod into the DCL’s dock connector using the DCL’s built-in dock connector cable. You push a button on the DCL and it transfers your photos from camera to iPod.
That’s basically it. The DCL is a white plastic box that’s roughly the size and shape of a white iPod. The controls on the DCL consist of a single button, and there’s a three light multicolour LED display on the front which gives you the current status of the device (iPod detected, transferring data, battery low, etc). Conveniently the back of the device has a legend showing you what each LED display mode means.
The reader takes advantage of the iPod firmware for photo transferring and stores all the transferred images in a folder named "DCIM" at the root level of the iPod’s hard drive. Each group of photographs is designated as one "roll", and the iPod is capable of displaying each roll, the date the roll was created and the number of pictures each roll contains. You can’t alter the contents of a roll, though you can delete it from the iPod if you wish. Naturally black and white iPods are not capable of displaying pictures - you just have to transfer the photos over and hope. Each roll is stored in a separate subfolder in the DCIM folder. It doesn’t matter if the iPod has been formatted for Macintosh (HFS+) or Windows (FAT32) - the DCIM folder is available to your computer platform of choice when you plug the iPod in in disc mode.
Incidentally, how is a "roll" defined? Well, a roll refers to a single set of photographs taken in one shoot. Boundaries of a shoot are set when you turn the camera on or off. So if you’re the sort of person who turns their camera on and off repeatedly throughout the day then you’ll end up with a whole ton of "rolls". If you just leave the camera on all the time then everything will end up in a single roll. This is kind of annoying and inconvenient, since sometimes putting the camera in a bag switches it off, but at least you have some modicum of control over what a roll is.
Good things about the DCL
Compared to the media reader, the DCL is merely annoyingly slow instead of painfully slow. It takes a lot longer to transfer files from the camera to the iPod than it does to pull the pictures off the iPod onto a computer, so it’s not a limitation of the FireWire/USB port on the iPod - it’s just a sluggish design on the part of the DCL. The DCL also uses two AA cells in lieu of four AAAs. This means a lot to me. I often travel with an external flash unit which uses four AA cells, so I use rechargeable NiMH cells with a portable charger. The DCL’s reliance on AAs means I don’t need to carry two types of cells around.
Other than that, it’s simple to use and more or less does as advertised - it lets you transfer pictures to your music player so you don’t have to carry as many expensive memory cards around.
Crappy things about the DCL
Here’s the part where it gets a bit frustrating. There are a number of significant limitations with the DCL.
- The most obvious is power sources. There are three in question - the camera, the DCL and the iPod all use separate power sources. Which means if you run out on one then the setup is useless. The camera and the DCL aren’t usually an issue, since you can just swap batteries out. The problem here is that the iPod uses an internal rechargeable battery and the DCL has no way of supplying power to it. So if your iPod runs out of power, which it may well do during a lot data transfer as it’s spinning its hard drive continuously and the thing takes so long to transfer data, then you lose everything. And then you have to recharge the iPod before you can go any further.
This power issue is the biggest problem with the whole DCL design. Belkin could have avoided it had they put a power input port on the DCL that then supplied power to the iPod via the dock connector cable, but they didn’t. A simple dock connector on the DCL body with passthroughs for power would have added a little bit of expense to the design, but would have radically reshaped its reusability. Oh, well.
When I used the DCL on my last trip I had this whole routine of charging up the camera, the iPod, transferring data to two iPods (packed in separate bags so if one got lost or stolen then I’d still have the photos somewhere) and generally messing around. It worked fine, but it took at least 20 minutes to half an hour every evening, which got a bit annoying after a while. It also requires some advance planning on when you charge the iPod and various batteries. Also, since all lithium-ion batteries lose their ability to hold a charge with time it’s possible an older iPod won’t have enough juice to record a whole set of images, so I also took to doing my data transfers daily to minimize the size of each transfer. (if I waited several days and tried to transfer a whole pile of files at once then I might never be able to do it if the iPod’s battery couldn’t keep up - the transfer would crap out partway through)
- The next problem is transfer time. As noted, the DCL is no speed demon and can take ages to transfer over a pile of photos. If you’re shooting RAW this can be a serious problem and you may find yourself with drained batteries before everything can be transferred. With JPEG I found it generally not a huge issue.
- Next is the fact that black and white iPods cannot display images, so you just have to hope for the best. I found myself keeping really valuable photos on the memory card and erasing the rest. Colour iPods can display JPEG images, though not RAW. But if you’re using a colour iPod then you’re probably better off using the much cheaper Apple camera interface for colour iPods, which is tiny and does not require a separate power source.
- A lesser power-related issue is that there's no battery gauge on the DCL - just a "low battery" warning light. So you don’t really have any way to gauge how the two AA cells are doing. I just recharged my AAs every few days and it was fine, but this is still sort of annoying.
- The DCL doesn’t support all cameras. You need a camera that supports either USB mass storage classes (ie: a camera which appears to your computer as a hard drive when you plug it in) or PTP (picture transfer protocol). Belkin publish a list of compatible cameras, but it’s not comprehensive and also lists non-existent cameras like the "EOS 330D". However, it appears that more cameras than appear on the list are compatible. I have an EOS 10D and it’s supposedly not compatible with the DCL, even though the 10D is PTP compliant. And it turns out that the DCL I own works fine with my 10D. So you’re best off testing the device first with your own camera before you buy, or get one from a place with a good money-back guarantee. I have heard that there are two versions of the DCL with different firmware and the earlier version doesn’t support the EOS 10D, but that’s a rumour that I can’t substantiate. Either way, check first.
- The DCL doesn’t support all iPods. It’s billed as requiring a dock connector, but it doesn’t work with the iPod mini and the iPod nano for firmware reasons and apparently the video/fifth gen iPod is out as well. You need a traditional white iPod (black in the case of the U2 special edition) with a 1.8" hard drive and the dock connector on the bottom (ie: it doesn't need a dock, just the narrow dock connector on the iPod body itself). Specifically, you need a third gen iPod (four buttons all in a row along the top) or a fourth gen iPod (clickwheel). If you have a third gen iPod you need iPod firmware 2.1 or better. First and second generation iPods, which have 6 pin FireWire ports on the top rather than dock connectors, are also not supported.
- In addition to the AA batteries you’ll need to bring your camera’s USB cable with you or else the whole thing is obviously useless. The DCL has a USB A socket on it and so accepts your bog-standard USB A cable (the wide rectangular kind, not the squarish kind with 45 degree chamfered corners).
- As noted earlier, you can delete a roll from your iPod once it has been transferred, but there is no way to delete individual pictures from within a roll. All selecting of pictures to keep or throw away must be done from the camera first.
- Finally, the build quality of the device is basically fine except for the battery door. This is really flimsily designed with little plastic tabs that are held under a great deal of pressure. I would exercise great caution opening the battery door on this thing - I suspect it’s very easily broken.
Summary
So. Do I recommend this thing? Sort of. I mean, it basically works. But its implementation is inconvenient and it’s quite slow. So it’s really not appropriate for professional or semi-professional work. Amateurs who are willing to put up with the hassle and time required to use it may find it a relatively inexpensive way of dealing with the growing problem of full memory cards when travelling. If you can afford the weight and the hassle, however, taking a laptop is probably a better bet. Not only is it faster and less fussy, but only viewing an image on a laptop screen will let you know if your pictures turned out right.
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