Dierk Haasis roadtests the JOBO GIGA VU Pro evolution/extreme

Digital allows us to take many more photos than before. At home and in our studios we can easily save several hundreds or thousands of gigabytes. They are stored on more and more hard drives, looked at on large, calibrated monitors and sorted with the help of image management software applications.

But when you are out and about, storing pictures can be a problem. If you’re in a great location such as the Lake District, the Alps, or Yosemite you don’t want to be limited by the amount of memory cards you have and previewing the “Big Picture” on a small LCD camera screen. Camera LCD screens are, good enough for checking basic composition and exposure using histograms and highlight control tools. You could add to your baggage and carry a laptop and a handful of rechargeable batteries, but a better option may be to use a small portable device.

The ultimate travelling companion is a mobile storage solution incorporating a high quality picture viewer.  JOBO’s top model GIGA Vu Pro evolution comes complete with software to decode colour profiles and display images correctly. The 3.7 inch screen is big, bright, sharp and calibrated.   But at £500 is it worth the price?

Consider this, compact flash cards come in a variety of capacities and speeds.  You can get an average 4 GB or 8 GB card for between £ 47 and £ 90. (cheaper cards are slower and have a higher failure rate). Nikon’s D200 produces 10 MB RAW files (compressed). So a 4 GB card may hold around 400 files. It may sound a lot, but if you’re out shooting for a day or weekend, it won’t last you long. A 4 GB card – currently offering the best ratio of price vs. capacity – will cost you £ 47 to store 400 photos.

A £500 JOBO GVPe with an 80 GB hard drive holds approximately 20 times this amount. which works out to about £ 25 per 4 GB. You would need 20 cards to store the same number of photos, and that would cost a massive £ 940.

JOBO GVPe – Capabilities

The JOBO Giga VGA display has 640 x 480 pixels and displays sharp photos, that are rich in contrast and colour-corrected. The GVPe comes with two different zoom features, the standard one simply zooms in on the image without any guide. It’s not easy trying to navigate around the photo without a visual reference.

The JD Loupe

Much better is the JD Loupe, named after National Geographic photographer Jay Dickman. This gives you two rectangles within the full view, one shows what you enlarge, the other, bigger one gives the crop to judge detail. In normal zoom mode you navigate the photo by moving it around, with the JD Loupe you move the crop over the image. The JD Loupe can only be accessed when in zoom mode. Both scales, zoom’s and JD Loupe’s, can be changed. That way you can go as close as you want to judge a critical part of your photo. Unfortunately, you lose the loupe when clicking one of the pre-defined zoom ratios (Fit and Full) since the soft buttons are multi-level. Curiously you do not lose it picking a colour, making this a bit awkward, too, since it is not quite clear if you pick the colour of a pixel in the loupe or within the rest of the photo; especially problematic when you try to get a bright red pixel in the Loupe and get RGB data looking like a dark grey, which lies beneath the loupe.

The image provided by the GVPe is a direct, on-the-fly conversion of the actual RAW photo, not the embedded JPEG. This gives the device an advantage over the camera’s LCD screen, which only shows a processed JPEG. Since the JOBO has to apply several settings the advantage is not as big as it seems; regardless of what you want to do later, the image on the monitor is processed to a set standard i.e. the embedded camera settings. Sharpening and contrast is not as generously applied as most DSLRs allowing the photographer to judge the sharpness. A list of compatible cameras is available as a PDF on JOBO’S Web site www.jobo.com