Canon Connect Station is a 1TB media hub for offloading content from cameras

If there’s one thing casual photographers are guilty of, it’s leaving their images on a memory card. Sure, memory card capacities are so large that you may never have to offload them, but they end up becoming digital graveyards for your photos and videos. Canon has created a new device, called the Connect Station, that’s designed to put all that content on the big screen, and share it. The company debuted the new product category at the 2015 International CES Show.

First previewed at Photokina in 2014 (codenamed Cross Media Station), the Connect Station CS100 ($300, available in April 2015) is essentially a network-attached storage (NAS) device, a 1TB portable hard drive connected to a home network that lets you archive, display, and share images and videos taken with a digital camera and camcorder.

The idea for such a product isn’t new, as there are other similar media storage and sharing drives available (in fact, Canon had a prototype of it five years ago, although that early version used different technologies). But the CS100, with near-field communication (NFC) and Wi-Fi built in, was designed to help Canon camera and camcorder owners get content off their media cards and give them a viewing experience they can enjoy.

The CS100 is a standalone product that doesn’t require a computer to function, although it does need to be connected to a TV in order to view content and menus; it supports Full HD displays via HDMI. To add content, you can transfer photos and videos wirelessly from Wi-Fi-enabled Canon cameras and camcorders (NFC helps to facilitate the pairing and download processes quickly); directly off an SD or Compact Flash card through the built-in card reader; or from a compatible camera or flash drive through the USB port. Although it uses the 802.11n Wi-Fi protocol, it’s much faster to insert a memory card.

The CS100’s onscreen display has an Apple TV-like menu system that you navigate through with the included remote control. As it is storing content, the CS100 automatically organizes photos and videos, and weeds out duplicates. What’s unique about the CS100 is it supports unprocessed RAW images from Canon’s advanced compacts and DSLRs, in addition to JPEG, MP4, MOV, and AVCHD file formats.

If the CS100 is connected to the Internet (Wi-Fi only), you can upload and download content to and from the device from smartphones, tablets, or computers (via a Web browser). You can also share content with other authorized CS100s via Canon’s Image Gateway online service. Image Gateway also lets you share content from a CS100 to social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Dropbox, as well as through email. Wi-Fi can also be used to connect to certain Canon Pixma and Selphy printers to print images.
Canon Connect Station 1

The 1TB might seem like a lot, but content like images and videos – especially RAW ones – can take up space in no time. The hard drive, however, isn’t expandable, nor will there be higher capacity versions at launch. However, you can back up the content to another hard drive via USB, to make room.

The CS100 aims to please those looking for an easy solution to save and share content from their Canon cameras, like grandparents. But, at $300, it’s priced a bit high. And unlike media-centric devices like Apple TV, features are limited and there are no additional functionalities like Netflix streaming.

An alternative would be to get a device like Western Digital’s $100 WD TV and pair that with an affordable external hard drive you can expand later, but that product lacks support for RAW files and it doesn’t automatically organize your content.