Canon Launches Portable Media Storage Devices

Canon, makers of many things digital camera-centric, has launched a couple of new portable digital storage devices aimed squarely at photographers. More than just hard drives with batteries, the M30 and M80 feature a full-color LCD screen for previewing images, digital image zooming, SD and CF card slots, and even a headphone jack for MP3 playback. The internal hard drives are at 30GB and 80GB, and are likely the same ones found in the latest generation of iPods.

If you’re a field photographer or on a long vacation sans-laptop, it’s a great way to manage mass amounts of photos without having to worry about dragging along multiple SD cards and with its USB 2.0 connection, sending the files for finishing should be a piece of spinach.

The only thing they might do to make this better would be to add MPEG playback, and perhaps WiFi or EV-DO/UMTS as a way to keep things in sync with the home office. A boy can dream.

Canon’s new portable photo viewers [Bios]