Field Kit Review: Building a Portable Preservation Lab for On‑Site Capture

Field Kit Review: Building a Portable Preservation Lab for On‑Site Capture

Hook: For on-site capture you need reliability, portability, and evidence-grade tools. In 2026 we reviewed field kits that help teams capture documents and artifacts with court-ready provenance.

Kit goals

Our ideal kit is small, reproducible, and creates artifacts that pass forensic scrutiny. It should include a camera, lighting, an evidence placard system, checksum utilities, and an offline backup medium.

What we tested

• Entry kit: smartphone with calibrated light diffuser and portable SSD.
• Pro kit: mirrorless camera, portable preservation work surface, tethered checksum device.
• Hybrid kit: rugged tablet with integrated capture app and automatic manifest generation.

Practical tips from fieldwork

1. Always tag captures with UTC timestamps and GPS where permissible.
2. Generate manifest files and publish their hashes to an immutable store for later verification.
3. Use an offline-first backup strategy to preserve artifacts during transfer; for executor and legal archives, the offline-first tool comparisons in our executor backup roundup are a good reference.

Lighting, lenses and image quality

Good lighting beats resolution. For landscape and scene capture, wide-angle lens comparisons provide insight into optical choices; see Comparing Wide-Angle Lenses for Landscape Photography for lens trade-offs that translate to preservation photography (distortion vs. field flatness).

Chain-of-custody and manifests

Every kit should produce a manifest that includes checksums, operator id, and a tamper-evident seal. When possible, commit a manifest hash to a public timestamping service or ledger to avoid later disputes — see Op-Return patterns in Op‑Return 2.0 for approaches to privacy-preserving commitments.

Use cases and selection

Choose an entry kit for rapid triage and a pro kit for evidentiary capture. Hybrid kits are best when you need portable automation and field verification by non-technical staff.

Bring the lab to the site. The difference between a useful capture and a court-ready artifact is reproducibility and provenance.

Author: Daniel Ortiz, Field Technologist, SimplyFile Cloud. Daniel trains teams on field capture best practices and runs our field kit test lab.