[ale] Digital Cameras and Linux

[Michael H. Warfield]

JANINDRA at MS.NDCORP.COM enscribed thusly:

> Does anyone have experience with digital cameras and Linux? I am just
> starting to do reasearch and was wondering if there are any special things I
> need to check for compatibility. Of course I am open to reccommendations as
> well. Thanks

	I'm using a Philips ESP-80 with Linux and it works great.  The
camera sports 1280x960 resolution and is supported by GPhoto.  If I were
in the market for a camera, I would check out GPhoto and see what the
state of support was there.

	That being said, the Philips ESP-80 uses the SmartMedia cards.
I recently bought an Olympus PCMCIA SmartMedia card adapter for my
laptop.  I'm in love.  At 115200 baud, it use to take almost a minute
for each picture to download to the PC (same speed Windows or Linux).
An 8 meg card would take almost a half an hour (25 pictures at 1280x960)!
Now, with a script, I pop the card into the laptop and archive off all
of the images and flush the card in under 30 seconds total.

	It's my understanding that the Smart Flash cards work just as well
and the PCMCIA adapters are a bit cheaper and easier to come by (the Smart
Media was $80 and I had to search for one on the net).  I also understand
that the floppy adapters (common for SmartMedia) may have problems with
Linux because the geometry of the drive in the floppy doesn't agree with
any standard floppy geometry.  The floppy adapters require special drivers
even with Windows.

	I have no knowledge or experience with any of the parallel port
drivers.  I do not believe that the USB cameras are currently supported
(considering that USB support in general is still bleeding edge).

	I still use GPhoto for previewing and organizing the images as well
as generating galleries of images.  My new grandson's web site,
<http://www.wittsend.com/logan>, was done with the ESP-80 and GPhoto.

> until(! -e $i) {
>        print "Randy";
> }

	Mike
-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 925-8248   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
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