By Shutterbug Staff

April 5, 2006 — There are many options for traveling photographers these days, including on-the-go download devices, portable CD and DVD burners and of course the venerable laptop computer. But a new breed of storage devices, USB Flash Drives, is also making a big for the store and show photographer who doesn’t want to lug along anything more than a drive the size of a pack of gum. Memorex has come up with a twist on all this with their TravelDrive ID USB Flash Drive. This is the first USB flash drive with a built-in, customizable LCD screen.

The clever iLCD screen not only shows the remaining memory but also lets you display a descriptive name for the drive or its contents. This sure helps me sort out the bunch of Flash Drives I have rattling around my backpack, and now I can assign one to teaching, one to word docs and one to storing images for show, all activities I might engage in over the course of a week.

What Memorex calls the “advanced Surface Stabilized Cholesterin (SSC) LCD” can display up to 11 characters, so you can ID it even when it’s not plugged into a computer’s USB port. TravelDrive ID conforms to the USB 2.0 standard and comes in 512MB, 1GB and 2GB of portable storage. It’s also Mac or PC compatible. The Memorex TravelDrive ID has a suggested retail price of $79.99 for 512MB of capacity, $119.99 for 1GB of capacity, and $199.99 for 2GB of capacity. It just shows you that there can be something new under the sun in something as “generic” as USB drives.

www.memorex.com