When Honestech approached me about reviewing this little Fotobox Plus slideshow maker, I wasn’t sure what need it met. “Why wouldn’t I just use a slideshow software program that’s already on my computer?”
It turns out this device really does more than most of those in the features department, but the more important aspect for travelers is that you can plug this into any Windows computer and make a slideshow. So if you’re using Internet cafes instead of a laptop, you can create the slideshow by just plugging this into any USB slot and then inserting the memory card with your great new travel photos. You can then save the slideshow to the Fotobox itself—well, as long as it’s not more than 512MB. Otherwise, upload it somewhere.
This is a pretty cool little gadget I must admit and designed well for travel. It unfolds when you’re plugging in the memory card, but then swivels back to be protected the rest of the time. Easy to carry and pack.
For me, “plug and play” didn’t happen the first time. I had to go into the folders of the device and find the Fotobox Manager application file to get it started. Then when I put in a memory card, it imported all but one photo, then got hung up and I had to shut it down with Windows Task Manager. Not a good sequence of events for a non-techie to figure out. It also seems to get freaked out by a memory card with both photos and video on it: that usually initiated an error message while importing, followed by a shutdown. I had to do a workaround, saving the video on the computer I was using then erasing the video from the memory card.
Obviously I hit a lot of bumps before I got the quirks figured out, but I forged on. After hours of practice, I can now put a good slideshow together. One of the main frustrations is that after you add music, nothing happens. After looking at page 68 of the instructions, I found that you have to take another step—dragging that music down onto the first slide where you want it to start. I never would have guessed that without looking it up. My other huge frustration is that controlling the order of the photos is a real pain. If you want to change the order of photos it takes several steps to move each one: only nine at a time are displayed, so you can’t go back or forward further than that to place a photo in one step. So if, for instance, you want to move photo #40 to the #1 spot, you can’t do that without spending several minutes dragging it up 8 or 9 spots at a time. When you add photos to the slideshow, it automatically puts them at the beginning, not the end, so there’s a lot of time wasted moving photos in this linear fashion.
Once you get the hang of it though (or read the whole long instruction book before starting), you can put together some really nice slideshows, then save them in a variety of formats. Just look at all these formats it will accept:
* Video Input : AVI, DV-AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VCD, SVCD, DVD, MOV, WMV, DVR-MS
* Video Output : AVI, DV-AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VCD, SVCD, DVD, WMV
You can upload straight to Facebook or YouTube and you can save what is now a video file in the right format for whatever device you’ll put it on, like the Sony PSP or the iPhone—of course for the latter it needs to be short and compressed since that device doesn’t have expandable memory. You can also burn the video onto a DVD and show it on a regular TV.
As for the shows themselves, you can pick the easy mode to keep it simple or choose the advanced mode to take more control. In this post are two slideshows I created, intentionally going nuts with the transitions (and in the Galapagos one, a cutesy theme) so you can get the general idea of what’s possible. I added music, but didn’t go all the way and do all you can do, like adding a caption to each photo or put in transitional title slides.
The Fotobox Plus lists for $80 (but $62 at Amazon with free shipping), so it depends on how much you like to make slideshows as to whether this is worth it for you, but it would be a pretty cool gift for someone relying on Internet cafes instead of their own laptop or netbook. Just make sure that’s someone who is patient or will keep things short. Now that I’ve put in my hours of trial and error learning, I kind of like this thing and my last airplane seatmate thought enough of it that he wrote down the name of the product after seeing the slideshow I put together on our flight. Not a bad endorsement.
See the full specs and screenshots at Honestech’s Fotobox page
