Jobo Giga Vu Extreme
£399.00
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Memory cards, hard drives and laptops have all dropped massively in price over the last year (2007-08) as the technology becomes cheaper, but portable storage devices, such as this new Jobo Giga Vu Extreme, maintain a hefty price tag. We find out if this one is worth the money.
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This new Jobo Giva Vu Extreme offers a lot of features for its hefty price tag. The viewing functions are better than those on the previous model, and there’s a nifty new digital loupe feature – a photo magnifying glass – to zoom in and check for sharpness.
The device has a CF card slot, but comes supplied with an adaptor to read SD cards too. There are two USB ports, one to connect to a computer or printer; the other for connecting to other devices ‘on the go’ (OTG) such as card readers, memory sticks or even a keyboard – useful if you need to rename or caption files. You can easily connect it to your TV or projector too – a remote control handset is included in the box and you can add music or moving images.
However, with a name like Extreme, we expected something more rugged than this. The only thing to keep the dust out of the sockets is the main cover, difficult to remove on occasion; rubber bungs would have been more dust-tight.
Importantly for photographers on the go, you can’t use the unit one handed. This is critical for those of us who download our cards while we’re still shooting. Plus, the card protrudes from the top, ruling out slipping it back into your bag as images download. Fortunately downloading is fast – taking just under two minutes to download 1GB of pictures, but it’s a shame it can take so long to do anything else. From pressing the On button it takes around 20 seconds before the device is ready to use. Annoyingly the shortcut buttons don’t always line up with their on-screen menu labels, making navigation tricky.
All in all, the Giga Vu Extreme is a great product for sharing images but doesn’t offer a solid solution for photographers in the field. For the same price you could pick up three 8GB Lexar Professional 300x CF cards or two 16GB and one 8GB Sandisk Extreme III CF cards instead. Or you could invest in a standard laptop with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive for around the same price.