Flashe Reviews

BUT, it uses medium format (120) film, and the fact that the negative is four times the size means that if you are careful you may find you get a photograph out of this camera better than the one that comes out of your 10 times the price 35 mm camera. To do so, you need to tape up the sides to minimize light leaks. Use black electrical tape.

Also realize that letting the light shine through can create some interesting pictures, and so try some without the tape, or with less tape. Also remove the square bracket inside that focuses the light on a neat rectangle, and instead you'll get vignetted photos that fade off on the sides.

Consider the cheaper model as well, the one that doesn't have the flash. The flash is difficult to use, and the batteries regularly fall out or come loose (go into a dark room to fix them!). I tape batteries in when I need to, and just don't use them when I'm outdoors.

Whatever you do, have fun, and do a search of "Holga" on the web -- you'll find a variety of websites devoted to this little babies.

Let me explain to you why I love this device so much:
First of all the accessories that come with your iAUDIO; it's all there: Your armband for sports, the carrying case, the headphones, line in cable, battery, manual, portable USB port and the USB cable. Admittedly, this doesn't make a great player, but it helps.

The body of the i4 is amazingly small and nearly completely made of lightweight aluminium. It feels and looks extremely durable. The unit is basically built around the iAUDIO's massive screen. Its 4 line LCD display is the biggest yet on any flash based mp3 player around. The screen also has 124 different backlight colours to choose from that give perfect readability in the dark. In direct sunlight, even though the backlight colours are no longer visible, the display is easy to read.

Sometimes I wonder how Cowon managed to fit all the following features into the iAUDIO's little body: line-in recording, voice recording, FM radio, FM radio recording & an mp3, wav, wma player. Even though the recording functions are all limited to a maximum of 128 kbps mp3s they all function well and have excellent sound on playback. The FM radio receiver is extremely powerful and can receive a lot of stations, although I live in the middle of nowhere.

Concerning the most important aspect of any audio player: The iAUDIOs sound can only be described as being extremely good. It's clean as hell and has more body than e.g. the iriver 700 or 800 series. The equaliser is also awesome (5 band; each band has +/-28) and the BBE is great! Altogether there are over 1.6 Trillion possibilities of setting the iAUDIOs jetEffect settings. That should do for pretty well everyone ;-)

Uploading songs to your player is easy. Just connect it to your PC and it will automatically register as a removable storage device (it shows up under "my computer"). Now all you need to do is drag'n'drop your songs and you are ready to go.

Navigating on the iAUDIO is simple. It takes a bit of getting used to, but should be no problem for non-techy people. If there is something you really don't understand you can just consult the manual.

Battery life on the iAUDIO is not outstanding, but for AAAs it's good. I get a little more than 9 hours from my Sanyo 800 mAh batteries and 12-13 from alkalines.

So I have been praising the iAUDIO all the time, but there are also some minor negative points: There is a slight gap between 2 songs (find me a flash mp3 player that has gapless playback :-p ). The device only operates on USB 1.1 and not on USB 2. Transfer rates for the iAUDIO are roughly 0.75 MB/s which is fully utilizing the USB 1.1 standards. Don't let yourself be fooled by false advertising of USB 2 being up to 40 times faster for flash players. To date the fastest USB 2 transfer rate on flash players is 2-3 times faster than the iAUDIOs USB 1.1.
The headphones that come packaged with the device can be too big for some peoples ears so you might have to buy some new ones. Also people with really big hands (I'm talking massive here) might have problems operating the iAUDIO4, because its controls are slightly on the small side.

The bottom line:
The iAUDIO4 is a good looking, tiny, really high quality device with excellent sound. Don't let yourself be put off by its trivial faults. The iAUDIO is awesome and I am sure you will love it too.

You will love it!!

A lot of other students used floppy disks, but the floppy disk drives in the internet cafes and even at the university would often ruin the disks forcing people to re-do their work.

Since returning to the states, I've used it mostly to share files between laptops and such while doing group work, carry install programs (web browser, AIM, etc), or to bring powerpoint presentations to class.

It comes with a keychain clip and a neckchain, three color covers (the USB plug swivels in and out of this cover) in blue, orange, and black, and a USB extension cable, presumably for connecting it to ports at the back of a desktop, that lights up bright blue when you plug it in (the USB drive itself also has an activity light unrelated to the ones in the cable).

Overall, a great product. Tiny, well styled, and easy to use.

No corrupt files in any of these cards yet!

If you have a higher megapixel camera (4 MP and up), I would recommend the Sandisk Ultra compactflash card, which has a maximum write speed of about 60x (although reaching this speed probably won't happen for all cameras because cameras themselves have a maximum write speed).

To figure out about how much memory a card will hold with a specific camera, take the following formula, which is a rough approximation:
# of Pictures = 3*(megabites on card)/(megapixels)
So, a 3 megapixel camera can store approximately 250 pictures on a 256 MB card.