Vosonic X’s-Drive Super VP6210  

	List of File Types that can be displayed
	Notes on General Operation
	Copying a camera card to the VP6210
	To view pictures
	Music
	To load pictures to PC using Picasa
	Miscellaneous notes
	A page about battery life test
	Suggestions for improvements
	Firmware Upgrades
	A quick tour of some VP6210 functions
	Experiments with jpeg file size and zooming picture

Portable Photo Storage, Photo Display, Music and Movie Player

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This unit can have any capacity 2.5" laptop drive of 9.5mm thickness, from 20 gig to 100 gig size is a good choice. The unit can be bought already fitted with a variety of hard drive sizes, or bought empty and the user can fit a suitable laptop drive using a tiny Philips screwdriver (supplied). If choosing a hard drive, then look for ones with the lowest possible current draw to get longer battery life. A few samples of brands I have are rated at 700mA but I also have other drives rated at 550mA, so it can vary a bit. Faster rotation drives will have higher current draws, and the speed gained may be ruined by the worse battery life. The Lithium Ion battery can be changed easily using the same supplied screwdriver to open a small access hatch. The battery hatch screw is tiny so be careful not to lose it. The battery can of course be re-charged while still installed.

The similar Vosonic VP6300 unit is slightly smaller and uses a 20 gig 1.8" drive. The later model VP6230 has a slightly larger LCD screen and few a few other features. They use the same basic firmware as the VP6210 but the VP6210, VP6300 and VP6230 firmware files are not interchangeable. The VP6300 simpler controls make it appear to be aimed more at the MP3 music users. These units are all much faster than previous Vosonic units when it comes to loading from memory cards. The smaller VP6300 unit gets more interesting as Toshiba are now selling 30 and 40 gig drives in 1.8" format and there's further advances in capacity coming that will probably take the 1.8" drives to way over 100 gig. 

The drive needs to be formatted to FAT32 standard and certain folders set up. The Format utility within the drive itself will set up the correct folders. Basic folders of MUSIC, PHOTO, MOVIE, and BACKUP are needed on the drive. Mac users may have to delete and re-create some of the basic folders to allow file transfer from Mac to VP6210.

Reads and writes and copies to and from in any combination (can copy cards to and from hard drive as well as from card to card without PC connected)... CF I/II, Microdrive, SM, SD/MMC, xD, MS and the following with appropriate adapters Mini SD, RS-MMC, MS Duo, MS Pro, MS Pro Duo. Can copy any files to hard drive and use it as general purpose backup or transporting edited images to other places as well as music, which can be playing while slide shows are happening.

Suits Win98/98SE (with driver) /Me/2000 SP3 up/XP, Linux 2.4 up, Mac OS 9.0 (with driver), Mac OS 10.0.1 up, USB 2.0 connection. Runs OK of course with USB1.1 but is slow downloading/uploading.

The LCD screen is quoted as 2" high resolution, but I'm not sure what the screen pixel count is. The text on the screen in menus etc is a bit small so don't forget to take your glasses if you have close vision problems. Latest firmware versions add the ability to display text files.

For general interest, here's James Turner's page on the new (at Jan '06) VP8350 http://www.jkturner.net/ 

The VP8350 has a bigger screen but still the same pixel count, but the main limiting factor for me is the hard drive size, stuck at 20gig until those 1.8" drives get bigger and more widely used.

My VP6210 bought in May 2005 in Australia came with 0A 1.1.5 firmware. The total box contents was....

• VP6210 unit with battery in it. Mine was hard drive less, I fitted my own 30 gig drive.

• Semi hard zipped case to protect unit.

• 100-240V AC adapter with 5V 2.5A output. Pins are USA style two pin and the Aussie unit comes with a small USA-Aussie adapter.

• Car charger 5V 2A output. This item not in some packages I've seen elsewhere.

• Remote control unit (for those TV slide shows) but to my mind unnecessary. 

• Small instruction manual, but it causes more confusion, ignore it.

• Small sized CD for Win98 drivers and misc, not needed at all for Win2000 or WinXP.

• USB cable for connecting to PC or Mac with mini plug same as Olympus and Fuji cameras use.

• Video cable for connecting to TV with RCA style plug for TV end..

• Stereo sound cable for external amplifier with 2 RCA plugs at amplifier end. You need a new cable with mini stereo jacks on both ends to suit most small external powered speakers sold now.

• Bud type earphones and covers.

• Mini screwdriver on key ring for hard drive and battery changing, also suits glasses frame screws.

Upgrade 0A-1.2.8 (DSP firmware) and V1.0D (ISP firmware) is currently available for download from Vosonic. Here's my page talking about firmware upgrades.  

Feel free to email me with any questions or complaints or errors that you find ...........  

List of File Types Displayable on LCD as per Vosonic Data (more on firmware page)

Other brand camera RAW files may display as a low resolution picture with no zoom ie Olympus C-5060.

V1.2.3 Firmware adds RAW, BMP and GIF files to show thumbnails. 

MPEG1 in dat & MPG file format, Motion JPEG in AVI and MOV file format, at 352x240 or smaller at 30 fps, MJPEG for Panasonic DMC-F1 MOV files. [Vosonic once said that 640x480 digital camera movies will not display but the 640x480 15fps movies in MOV file type from my Olympus C-5060 play OK. Maybe they upgraded the firmware and forgot to tell people.   I was recently sent a 640x480 30fps MOV file from another brand to test and it played OK. Also later received a 640x480 30fps AVI file and it played OK as well.]

V1.2.3 adds MJPEG decoder to support 640x480 at 30 fps. V1.2.4 adds some Xvid support and add m4s2 MPEG-4 support for Casio EX-Z750.

Follow this link to German site for clearer list of file types, particularly video files, which I have yet to fully research.

General Operation

Problems Maybe

• One forum thread from a user in Holland points to a possible problem with the VP6210 reading Sandisk Extreme III CF cards.  Later.... it seems that Vosonic couldn't duplicate the problem and that now another user in Perth Australia does use a Sandisk Extreme III CF card with no problems at all. Maybe it was some incompatibility problem being generated by the camera, Canon in this case.

• Another email contact had problems with Sony MS cards in that the files were read OK to the VP6210 but the files when copied to the PC would not display at all. This person got cunning and then copied the files on the VP6210 back to the MS memory card and then used the VP6210 as a card reader and the files could now be recognised by the PC. Don't know what happened there, but that was very smart thinking to recover the situation.

• My car adapter when tested blew its 2A fuse. Pulling it apart I found a short circuit between the spring under the fuse and the side ground contact. Resoldered it and sleeved parts with some heat shrink tube. Now is OK (put it down to careless soldering by the supplier of the adapter)  but it should really have maybe a 3A fuse instead as the current draw does get higher as the disk drive cycles up when connected to the car charger. My brand was labelled 'Spec Lin' (made in China) and was in the box as I bought the unit.

• Be careful of attempting copies of regular folders off your PC hard drive to the VP6210 for temporary backup or for attempting to transfer between PCs using this as a portable drive. I encountered many errors when it indicated "folders too deep" and also left various errors on the VP6210 drive that only Partition Magic 8 seemed to be able to fix easily. The necessarily simple hard drive handling firmware in the VP6210 is a little limited. Be careful.

• Just confirmed from another user is that the TV settings of PAL and NTSC seem to be mixed up. Always try both settings on your TV to see which works best. This was fixed in firmware upgrade 0A-1.1.8 and up.

• Another issue that has just surfaced is a user who had a CF card work one day and from then on it didn't and nothing made sense. Looking inside he found bent CF socket pins, careful straightening with tweezers fixed that. So be very careful with inserting CF card, if the pins get bent too far, then it's the end of that trip.
  

To copy a camera memory card to the VP6210 hard drive.

Both Full Backup and Photo Backup create a new folder each time within the BACKUP folder on the VP6210 hard drive. This folder number increments with each transfer from a memory card. If I copy my CF card to the VP6210 three times during the day I will end up with the following list of folders, no matter whether it was Full backup or Photo Backup or a mixture of methods. Indeed I could have copied the same card 3 times in the same session and got the same result (of course in that case and the contents of the 5 folders would be identical). 

CF-00000

CF-00001

CF-00002.

This list assumes no previous CF card transfers still remained on the hard drive.  

The only other cards I have used on the unit are xD and SD which result in XD-00000 and SD-00000 folder names.

Full Backup copies the whole folder tree on the camera memory card to the BACKUP folder on the hard drive into a new folder number as above. It keeps the original file names intact. So when I later look at the above folders on the VP6210 using Windows Explorer I see the following... (on my laptop today it appears as drive E: along with the card ports. I earlier renamed the Vosonics hard drive to something recognisable).

6210 30G (E:) \ BACKUP \ CF-00000 \ DCIM \ 111OLYMP \ P6041002.JPG, P6041003.JPG, P6041004.JPG, P6041005.JPG, P6041006.JPG

Next I did a Photo Backup with the same memory card contents...

Photo Backup copies just the image files found to the BACKUP folder with similar folder naming, but with new file names created. In this case I followed the above Full Backup with a Photo Backup of the same card contents so the folder name incremented and I ended up with the following seen by Windows Explorer....

6210 30G (E:) \ BACKUP \ CF-00001 \ 111-1002.JPG, 111-1003.JPG, 111-1004.JPG, 111-1005.JPG, 111-1006.JPG.

The DCIM and 111OLYMP folders are not used and the 111 part of the camera folder replaces the first digits of the Olympus file name.

It is best to make sure your camera does not reset the numbering system each time you load a new card, otherwise keeping track of things can be awkward once loaded to the PC. I think it is best to stick to the Full Backup mode above to make sure the original file names are preserved, even though it does mean a bit more fiddling with folders when searching for images.

An example of what you may see.....

Full Backup                                                                                     Photo Backup

This figure above shows the result of Explorer looking at the Full Backup result in the left half and the Photo Backup result in the right half. The name "6210 30G" was chosen for the hard drive so I knew what disk I was looking at as I have a few different USB drives I may connect from time to time. 

The "_for transfer time" is my folder on the VP6210 where I am gathering files in order to make the final full transfer from the laptop to my desktop PC easier. The Removable Disks F:, G: and H: are the camera card ports on the VP6210. Your system may number these differently.

To see the pictures.

• Hold power button for 2 seconds to power the unit on.
• Move the selection to the BACKUP icon or to the folder where you know your photos may be stored.
• Press the √ button and move the selection to the last folder or the folder you want.
• Press the √ button and the pictures appear as thumbnails, use ↕↔ to select an image. Images that are edited on the PC and written back to the hard drive may not display a thumbnail but will display OK when opened.
• Press the MENU button and select Delete if needed for junk shots. You can also toggle icon/list view of images as well. Use √ button to complete the choice.
• Press the √ button on an icon image or file name and the picture appears full screen.
• Press MENU and then press the √ button and the display will toggle between showing EXIF data or not.  
• The displayed image can also be set as the background display. This is usually a good idea as the basic Vosonic screen does seem to make the items hard to read at times. The background image is shown at lower contrast so it won't interfere with seeing the menus and icons.
• Press the + button to zoom in and - to zoom out and move around image with the ↕↔ buttons. Table below talks about the zoom function ratios.
• With an image shown full size press MENU to select the Slide Show option and √ to start the slide show.
• Use ESC to stop the slide show.
• To use the unit with a TV set for display, set the unit for NTSC (USA) or PAL (rest of world mostly) TV and connect with the supplied cable. Use the supplied remote control to sit back and see the show. The √ button used previously rotates an image for sensible display on the TV. The TV resolution is quite coarse and seems to be non-interlaced. PAL users should also try NTSC setting as many TV sets will do both standards, NTSC on a suitable PAL TV somehow seemed smoother.
• RAW file review times - this issue hadn't surfaced with me as yet because I currently don't have access to any acceptable (to the VP6210) RAW files, but one user has reported that Olympus E-1 ORF files take 1.5 seconds to open on the display and the up to 8x zoom happens instantaneously. Some other brand devices are distressingly slow in this area. Aha, it surfaces that the VP6210 must be handling the embedded jpeg file and not the actual RAW data itself - to me this is OK, because if I wanted to look at the real RAW data I would have taken my laptop.

Music

First experiments - I used iTunes (free from www.apple.com) on my Windows PC to load a CD to a folder on the PC, using the input mode of auto error correction and converting to high quality MP3. Next I copied that whole album folder to the Music folder on the VP6210 and then selected an individual music file and started playing it. While playing a song, press the Menu button to get playing conditions right for you. When a tune finishes there is a few seconds delay while the hard drive wakes up and loads the next tune, slightly annoying. The supplied bud earphones are a bit crummy, but work well enough for casual listening. Fed to a decent amplifier the music has a bit too much bass for me, I like a flat response, so some tuning of tone controls is necessary even in the Normal setting, or select a different equalizer setting. But it sounds promising, next is to try even further compressed MP3 files to see how crummy the sound gets with the increased compression. Of course it doesn't have to be music, it could be talking books, foreign language lessons, whatever. But my prime use is storing photos while on a holiday and carrying important backup files, music is a distant second use for me, if at all.

Early experiments using the supplied low cost bud earphones leads me to believe that anything below 192 kbps MP3 is dreadful, you can hear digital noise clearly. The 192 kbps sounded OK so for my purpose, but if I ever use the music function seriously, I would record my MP3 files at 224 kbps to be on the safe side. I compared those files with listening to the full size WAV file copied to the VP6210. Again I used iTunes all through for all the recording tests.

Battery life test with music- I loaded up a gigabyte of CDs (13 I think, at MP3 224kbps) and then after fully charging the battery let it run with the earphones at about half volume. Took a few looks at the screen during the test to see the battery indicator. At a bit over 6 hours of continuous playing the battery indicator was red, the screen display wavered a bit in brightness and the hard drive was making making what seemed like unsuccessful start attempts.

The bud earphones frustrate me so I ought a (really expensive ha ha) pair of over the head earphones for Aus$2.20 (US$1.50) and it is much better sounding and easier to use. Maybe I should spend more than $2 to do it justice!

When the image displays, it shows full screen and the "Image Displayed at" figure is shown on the bottom right of the screen. Using the "+" button the zoom then goes out to 4x and the resulting zoom effect on the screen is shown in the last column. For most cameras available now, the view zoom is about 8x to 12x and is quite useful for some close examination for camera shake and focus blur. The sizes of 12 megapixel and up were resized from a smaller file in an edit program and re-written onto a CF card. With the larger files such as 18 and 27 megapixels, the top zoom of 4x as shown on the screen has display errors in that extra blue lines were appearing randomly. So with those bigger megapixel counts the maximum screen zoom cannot be relied upon.

To load the pictures onto the computer using Picasa. (free at http://www.picasa.com )

• Make sure Picasa is set to the basic folder you need via Tools-Options-General-Save Imported Pictures In…
• Plug the USB cable into the computer and the VP6210 drive unit and power the VP6210 unit on.
• If set up correctly and you loaded the image using the Photo Backup mode, then Picasa will automatically open in Import mode and the pictures will appear as thumbnails in Picasa with previously imported images showing as defaulted to not download a second time. If you used the Full Backup mode the files retain their camera file names and camera folder structure, so you have to tell Picasa to Import then pick your way down through the VP6210 folders until you find the images, then Import All.
• Click on Finish to be able to make a new folder name for this set of images.
• When finished importing then make sure to later move or delete the folders from the BACKUP folder in the unit. Use either Windows Explorer while connected, or the unit's own copy/paste/delete functions to do this. A good idea after copying the files to the PC (if you have the space on the VP6210), is to Copy the folders from the Backup folder and Paste them into the Photo folder and then Delete the folders in the Backup folder. That way you carry a backup for your photos that can be deleted as you later need more space in the Backup folder.
• Normally you cannot turn off the unit until you have done the Windows XP or Windows 2000 'Safely Remove Hardware' routine, for this reason it is best to use the AC adapter to power the unit when importing to the PC. Not tested as yet, but word has it that the unit does use some of the 5 volt supply from the USB to aid battery life when downloading. Current testing shows that the unit goes into "USB Mode" when connected to the PC and blanks the screen early, the hard drive runs all the time and the battery indicator seems to vary only very slowly, so I guess the unit is drawing some power from the PC. It seems that no harm is done by plugging an already turned on unit into the USB, it just goes immediately into "USB Mode" as shown on the unit's screen.
• The unit looks like a normal hard drive to Windows (or Mac) so transfers, copies, deletes etc can all be done with Windows Explorer or the Mac equivalent, bearing in mind the information above somewhere.

Specific questions about the unit seem to be speedily answered if emails are sent to the 'service' email address found on the Vosonic website 'contact us' page. Of course the answers are necessarily quite brief and mostly assume some technical ability.