Anxiously awaiting arrival of Olympus C-2020. Are rewritable CD ROM drives the best way to store my images? Any suggestions on which unit to buy, specs, speed etc? I will probably go with an internal unit.This is a new hobby to me and I would like to start off with the right hardware.Thanks

-- David Eimers (fishflash1@aol.com), January 29, 2000

Answers

If you use writable media rather than re-writable, you save money on the media and you can read it on any other cd rom. This is especially useful if you are planing to get images printed at a later date. The rewritable media is good for system backups

-- jonathan ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), January 29, 2000.

Depending on your software, CD-RW disks can be produced that can be read in any CD-ROM drive. I bought a Mitsumi CD-RW drive from Kodak's online store that I use for this purpose. CD-RW disks are getting almost as cheap as CD-R disks, and offer the ability to delete and change images/files. CD-RW is my personal preference.

-- Steve (MilwaukeeChrome@aol.com), January 29, 2000.

By all means buy a CD-RW drive, but use mostly CD-R media in it.

CD-R media are my personal preference because they burn faster than CD-RWs (especially the time it takes for format thenm before writing data) and they are cheaper and more reliable.

-bruce

-- bruce komusin (bkomusin@bigfoot.com), February 02, 2000.

I wrote a little bit on my travels into the digital world and stuck it on my web page. http://pages.prodigy.net/daveclark see "Digital Photos can be hazardous to you Wealth!"

I would suggest your first purchase should be a 20g hard drive for about $200. This will give you a super start on holding a lot of stuff. Then when you get a little more capital, go for the writable cd. With 650 meg per cd you really can build super picture cds.

I recently put all of the pic that I took last year plus some scans. Only about 400 photos. I wrote a vb program to take all of the photos on a directory and build a html base viewer. I can then build cd's using this technique and give them out to anyone. No software installation required as long as you have a browser. I tried to add small photos to the web pages. They actually worked fairly web but kind of slow. A web page with 12-16 photos of 800k each takes a few minutes to load, especially from a cd rom. Single images - full screen is not bad.

I have had a few problems with the cd, but when I build a read-only directly from the hard drive it works pretty good. When you use one of your photos to add a snappy label to your cd it really looks nice. I gave my cd's to my kids and siblings. They got a lot of pictures and I got off site storage for my photos. :)

-- Dave Clark (daveclark@mail.com), February 03, 2000.