Cannibals Descend on MP3 Players

Lovely headline, don’t you think? Not mine, alas, but the header on a Wired story about digital photography. Quote:

“Digital photographers have found a source of cheap microdrives for their cameras: Creative Technology’s MuVo2 digital music player.

Like Apple Computer’s iPod mini, the MuVo2 is based on a 4-GB microdrive from Hitachi. But while the Hitachi microdrive retails for about $500 when sold as a storage device for digital cameras, the MuVo2 costs about $200.

As someone put it on a website forum, you get the microdrive for more than 50 percent off, and a free pair of headphones.

“The price was right,” said Norman Yee, a professional photographer who bought a MuVo2 so he could use its hard drive in his Canon EOS 10D digital camera. Yee then took the 1-GB CompactFlash card he was using in the camera and put it in the MuVo2. Both work perfectly, he said. The Hitachi microdrive is the same size as a standard CompactFlash, or CF, card, a popular storage medium for digital cameras. In fact, the drive is designed to be interchangeable with CF cards. The drive can simply be inserted into the camera and formatted to store pictures. The drive can also be read with most CF card readers.”