Tony, the idea is transportability and for transient storage, not permanent storage. A friend and his daughter just spent 4 months overseas, came back with over 3000 images each. A laptop is simply too bulky (and fragile) to carry. The same applies to bushwalking. No OS to boot, simply plug in the card, one button press and in a short while the contents of your flash card are copied to HDD. The unit is small and will fit easily in your LowePro (of course everyone has one.....
) or can be carried on your belt.
Doug, they don't display the images, the display is text only status display. I don't know what checking is done within the device for validation but the unit does save to seperate folders and doesn't overwrite on the HDD even if images are captured with identical filenames. If there is a misread the unit will indicate and you can start again. The files are not deleted from the card so if you have reservations about the transfer you still have the images on the card until deleted in your camera. As I said my mate bought back over 3000 images, no problems occurred, but nothing is completely foolproof, even the flashcard you have in your camera can be corrupted. The unit is simple to use, there is only an on/off button and a transfer button. The % completed shows as does the HDD capacity remaining and battery capacity. If you forget to turn off the unit powers off automatically after 1 minute.