Iomega FotoShow Digital Image Center review: Iomega FotoShow Digital Image Center

When the Iomega Zip drive was introduced a few years back, it solved countless problems for the data-hungry, floppy-drive masses. Well, Iomega is in the game once again; this time the company is out to win the hearts of digital photographers with its FotoShow Digital Image Center. This all-in-one device boasts a digital card reader, a Zip drive, a photo storage center, an image presentation tool, and more. When the Iomega Zip drive was introduced a few years back, it solved countless problems for the data-hungry, floppy-drive masses. Well, Iomega is in the game once again; this time the company is out to win the hearts of digital photographers with its FotoShow Digital Image Center. This all-in-one device boasts a digital card reader, a Zip drive, a photo storage center, an image presentation tool, and more.

Zip to It
If you're familiar with all things Zip, you'll see that the FotoShow is your standard 250MB Zip drive decked out with a Motorola PowerPC microprocessor. This enables the handsome, silver-and-black, space-age storage facility to transfer images from CompactFlash card, SmartMedia card, and Microdrive digital film to 250MB Zip disks.

The number of images you are able to store on one 250MB Zip disk depends on both the image resolution and the type of digital camera you use to shoot your photos, but you should expect somewhere around 1,000 images at 1,024 by 768. To put it simply, this will solve almost all of your image-storage problems in one fell swoop by freeing up your hard drive and allowing you to upload images onto one standard disk.

Transferring images to the Zip was a little less than zippy, though, considering that a standard card reader could do the job in almost half the time. However, with the simplicity of one-button copying, it was well worth the wait.

TV Eye
Although it has standard Zip drive capabilities, including a USB connection to the computer, the main interface for the FotoShow is through the television, a strange choice in this day of PC domination. But by hooking up FotoShow directly to your TV (using either RCA or S-Video connectors), you can view your stored photos just as simply as you would flip through channels.

Thanks to the FotoShow's included remote control and the built-in visual interface, you can scroll through photos on your television monitor, compile slide shows, select colorful backgrounds, and arrange your photos in personalized albums, all stored on Zip disk. In addition, you can do some light editing of your photos using the cropping tool, the red-eye removal tool, or any of the basic visual effects (Sepia, Black And White, and Posterize to name a few) that come with the FotoShow--not to mention the childhood flashbacks induced by the Tex Avery cartoonlike sounds you'll hear when hitting the buttons.

The $300 list price is a bit steep for a Zip drive. However, considering its capabilities and its timesaving innovations, the FotoShow's sticker price suddenly looks like chump change.