DaYang DP-Box
 

I couldn't find any info here on the "DP-Box" solution of a company called DaYang from China/Hong Kong. So I wonder if anyone has ever heard of this product or even any experiences!? I mailed the company for some price tag info, as they claim to have the lowest price in the market of tapeless DV recording solutions. ...so far no reply

Here are some links to the product websites...
http://www.dayang.com.cn/dayang_engl...p?artcle_id=65
http://www.dayang.com/product/dpower.htm

It looks like a Citidisk from Shining. Except of course, for the Dayang logo that is.

http://www.shining.com/

Yes, looks like the same thing. It's often the case, especially in China, to sell the same thing with different brands... e.g. DVD players, TV sets, MP3 players...
But the price tag of the Citydisk is not really low. Just yesterday I saw such a "OTG" box in a store. That's an external USB2.0 harddisk case with the function to copy content from a digital camera or MP3 player to the disk without the use of a computer. It costs only around 35US$. Why FireWire solutions are so expensive then?? It's almost the same functionallity...
Daniel, do you own such a Citydisk? If yes, any experiences to share?

It is NOT almost the exact same functionality. A direct-to-disk recorder does
much more. It has quite complex firmware to write the incoming DV stream to
disk (in different formats). It usually has external controls and status display
to what is going on (sometimes with an LCD screen to show you how much
recording time is remaining and how much battery is remaining etc.). It needs
to be able to cope with higher data rates so it is more difficult to design.

Do I think it is expensive? Yes, but that is only relative. If you need this to
run a business it really isn't that expensive and it should pay for it self pretty
soon. If you are just out there to making your own movies (like I am) it may
indeed be expensive, but then, you don't really need it, now do you?

Yes, it may be more easy to have such a system, but it is not critical to shoot
and edit your movie. So if you really do want to have it, just save money
every month to get it. Otherwise just record with a laptop you may have
lying around or record to tape.

p.s. one extra reason why this stuff is more expensive is beacuse a lot less
units are sold than regular external drives, MP3 players or photo tanks
(because a lot more people dabble with photography, and memory cards fill
up a lot faster). Tape is still cheap (versus memory cards)!

Hi Andreas,

You will find a few experience reports here in this forum, if you make a search using citidisk or citidisc as a search criteria.

I tried out a Citidisk a while back. I didn't have much luck with it. But Shining still seems to be making and upgrading them, so someone must be buying the Citidisk. Maybe it's Dayang.

I think that the major difference between a D2D DV capture device and a OTG HDD device as that capturing video is not just transferring files from one medium to another. I imagine that the OTG box you are talking about just copies data, it doesn't interpret it. Rob's P.S. is also definitely a factor. If we can convince him and others of his kind to by these gismos, the price of the reliable D2D devices will surely go down. I think we will have to wait a few years, though.