Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The Wolverine ESP (& Sonoma Wine Country)


Up into Sonoma County yesterday for two purposes:

—take pix of the wine country (finally), and
—test my new Costco acquisition, the Wolverine ESP.

The Wolverine ESP (hereafter called the ESP) is a digital device that functions something like an iPod but is meant primarily for photographic purposes. It has various slots for all of the different memory cards that are now in use; upon insertion of a particular card the photographic files contained therein can be transferred to the ESP’s hard drive (up to 100 gigabytes!) Then you either set aside the memory card using the ESP to function as a backup, or you reformat the card and use it again.

To make it a real-life test I decided to take a bunch of pix, transfer them to the ESP and then reformat the card, relying solely on the ESP for photo storage.

So, off to Buena Vista Winery in the early AM, ambling around the various vineyards scattered just off the road. An overcast day, for a (welcome) change, helping to keep the contrast down. After a goodly amount of exposures I settled down in the back seat of the Infiniti, fired up the ESP, inserted the CF card, and . . . nothing. Nothing happened: no menu items, no pop-up window, no nothing.

Luckily I had brought the instructions, which had an alternate way of navigating and opening the CF card. Whoa!

But it worked. The remaining issue is that when the pix are displayed on the screen the resolution is pretty poor: you really can’t use the device display to review them. I have sent an email to Wolverine concerning this issue.

Photo: Vineyards—Sonoma County, 2008

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