Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 10:26:00 +1000 From: david@burren.cx To: chad@DCFinc.com Cc: jamil_taylor@pobox.com (Jamil Taylor), wyrdwulf@catskill.net, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: digital camera Message-ID: <19682.990231960@burren.cx> In-Reply-To: Message from "Chad R. Larson" <chad@DCFinc.com> of "Fri, 18 May 2001 10:47:24 MST." <200105181747.KAA21139@freeway.dcfinc.com>
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Chad R. Larson wrote: > Mine is the earlier Mavica that writes to floppies. Very handy. It > can make image copies of floppies, so you can leave a set of > Thanksgiving pictures with the relatives. > > But with today's multi-megapixel CCDs, a regular floppy won't cut > it. Perhaps an LS-120? There is one such camera on the market: the 3MP Panasonic PV-SD5000. Check out http://www.steves-digicams.com/sd5000.html if you're curious. I'm not recommending the camera in any way though - it's big and digicams aren't really one of Panasonic's strengths. How popular are LS-120's in the scheme of things anyway? My own digicams (a Nikon 950 and a Canon D30) both use CompactFlash cards, and if you have a notebook (or a desktop with PCMCIA slots) I find just popping out the card and putting it (with el cheapo PC-Card adapter) into the notebook is the simplest option. CompactFlash is just a subset of PCMCIA anyway, and the cards just appear as MSDOS-formatted ATA devices. The transfer rate's not bad either, except that there's no DMA support so lots of CPU time is chewed up by interrupts. Depends how much CPU you've got to spare as to whether that's a problem. I haven't investigated getting data off SmartMedia or MemoryStick cards. Most cameras with serial ports are supported by Gphoto, but the transfer rates suck. Many cameras now come with USB, and USB card readers for all the card formats are also available. However, finding one that uses standard umass protocols is a difficult job. Most seem to have done the normal USB thing and invented their own protocol. I'm impressed to hear that the Sony DSC-S70 has done things the "right" way. Also, I've noticed under Win2K on a colleague's VAIO that the MemoryStick slot shows up as a USB drive, but I don't know if it uses the umass protocols. Sony even have a USB mouse with MemoryStick slot, which could be useful if you wanted to read a card while the camera had a different card in it.... Bottom line I guess - if you've got access to PCMCIA slots your choice of camera is opened up a little more to focus on photographic features. Also, I've found that taking a FreeBSD-loaded notebook with USB into camera stores takes the guesswork out of things. Are we off-topic yet? :) __ David Burren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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