While the cost of digital photography media is coming down, if you're a professional photographer - or a serious amateur - then shelling out for several Microdrives or other forms of high capacity memory card can still become expensive rather quickly. But you probably don't want to carry a laptop around with you just so that you can download the image files, wipe the memory card and start again.

If this sounds like your situation, then the DigiMagic DM220 has been designed with you in mind. It's an external CD writer, capable of using CD-R and CD-RW media, and it's portable. It comes with a mains power adapter, a USB cable (the drive can be used with USB 1.1 or 2.0 systems), a copy of Nero Express CD burning software and a blank disc to get you started.

So far, so expensive. Why would you pay this much money for an external CD writer? For two reasons. First, it comes with a battery pack that allows you to use it with four AA-sized batteries, so it really is portable, if a little chunkier than most such drives, which are - like this one - based on laptop CD mechanisms.

But the most important reason is the slot in the front, into which you can insert CompactFlash cards. If you do so, and press the large button on the top of the drive marked 'Copy', the image files on the CompactFlash card will be transferred onto a CD-R or CD-RW disc. Once that's complete, you can remove the CF card, reformat it in your camera and use it again.

The DigiMagic DM220 supports multi-session operation, which means you can copy the contents of several cards to the same CD and access them all when you return to your computer. And if you don't use CompactFlash cards, but some other format, there's an adapter in the box that'll let you use SmartMedia, MemoryStick, MultiMedia Card and SecureDigital cards too.

The downside is that you're limited to around 640MB per disc, so it's not suitable for backing up 1GB memory cards, at least not if they're full. But it's ideal for 512MB cards, which should take around seven minutes to copy to CD. A selection of LEDs lets you know what's happening, and it's all pretty painless and easy to use. Once back at your PC you can plug the drive in and use it as a conventional 24x/8x CD reader/writer again.

This is an expensive item compared to most CD writers, but it fills an interesting niche and is likely to be of interest to photographers who need to shoot literally hundreds of photos while away from a laptop or desktop computer. Given the cost of CD media, this could work out a lot cheaper than buying a fist-full of memory cards.