If you're able to post to the forum, you have access to a computer. Just burn a DVD or two.

I'd look into one of the Epson P**** viewers/storage devices, but I have no experience with battery life. It seems that reliability would be more important then speed.

Unless you luck into a journalist who just finished reviewing a broad range of storage devices, your question will probably go unanswered. Few shooters have the time and money to acquire an array of these devices to compare.

In budgeting for a "trip of a lifetime", a laptop with a DVD burner would most likely be factored in. I rather favour the idea of DVDs since it would be possible to burn a copy to keep in one's luggage and another to mail home. It doubles the chances of one or the other arriving. I would also keep a copy on the laptop's hard drive. Redundancy is the key to data security.

There are also stand-alone card-reader/DVD-burners like this one which would warrant consideration.
DVD Burner

Another possibility if one is traveling in developed regions of the world, are business centres that can do this for you. With no 8GB cards available, I planned to do a good bit of shooting in Nevada a couple of years back and found that there were several Kinko's stores there that could do the read-and-burn for me.

For hard drive based storage, there are a wide variety of devices including multimedia players with card-reading abilities. The Epsons are certainly highly regarded with high resolution screens that shooters use on location for proofing to clients. They are also quite pricey. The downside is that hard-drives all eventually crash. Those in portable devices are certainly quite robust, but still I would like to have backup for any image I store on a hard-drive.

That gets us back to laptops, where one can view, store and backup to DVDs. Portable hard drives can also be used as backup with laptops, but DVDs offer the mail-home advantage. There is a rich variety of solutions out there and what may be perfect for me might be a dreadful inconvenient solution for you.

I have had a Wolverine 20GB storage device since 2005. I got it when all I had were 128MB cards as an emergency upload device when I took a vacation to Nashville in case my cards got filled. Since then I keep it in my disaster bag in case the power goes out or I have to shot through a disaster and need the device to hold pictures till the power comes back up.

The only time I used it since I recharged it about 3 week prior to that and it had 3/4 battery charge left in it. It upload my 2GB CF card that had about 1.2GB on it in 8 minutes. Had 1/2 battery left. Several of my fellow professionals and friends have the newer and higher capacity Wolverine devices 60Gb model and they like them. I asked one about battery life and he said about 2 hours constant uploading.

Hope this offers some help.

Generally if I see a disaster coming or know I might need it I top of the battery the day before. I usually jut use my laptop with a 100GB hard drive (65GB free space) to hold the photos till I can load to my storage server and DVDs.

dave

Usually I burn my images from the card into DVD one in one of those Internet Cafe'.

Go to pricegrabber.com and compare the devices you're interested in and read their reviews.

Also on the safety side, it's a bad idea to travel with 8GB cards. If you lose one, you lose 8GB or photos, you realize that. Better have a bunch of 2 GB cards, if you lose one it won't be as bad.

Luca