[lug] OT: Digital cameras

[Sean Reifschneider]

>special cases. Can anyone suggest makes and models of *less expensive* 

The Casio Exilim is less expensive than many -- it's hard to know what
you define that as.  It's around $300 for a 2 megapixel camera.  Evelyn
got me one last month, and it rocks.  The cheif benefit being that it's
*FRICKING TINY*...  The size of 11 credit cards stacked, roughly.  It's
so small I've taken to carrying it with me everywhere.

I've decided that my idea camera is two cameras.  One super small one,
and one fairly respectable TTL camera if I want to take serious
pictures.  Mostly I don't take serious pictures though.

>Can someone suggest the best type of connect if linux might be involved, 

The most reliable I've found is to use a PCMCIA media adapter.  I was
able to find a fairly reliable USB adapter for my last camera -- I'd
pull out the Smart Media card and put it in this adapter, then plug it
into my computer.

The new camera is USB, but I kept running into data transfer errors that
freaked things out trying to talk to it.  I got a different USB<->MMC
adapter and that was a bit more reliable (and more portable than the
USB "base" for the camera).  However, I also ordered this MMC<->CF
adapter, which I use in the CF slot of my laptop, and that works
amazingly well.

Now I just eject the card from my camera, stick it in my laptop, wait
until I hear the second beep, then put it back in the camera.  I have a
script that detects when I put in the SD adapter and copies images off.

>e.g., avoid firewire, go USB? How about memory, e.g., "memory sticks are 
>nice", or "memory sticks fail when temperature changes", or "mini-cd's 
>are wonderful"?

Memory sticks sux0rs because they are just yet another proprietary
memory standard -- like we needed another one.  If you want a laptop
with a Memory Stick slot, you need to get a Sony.  I like that Smart
Media is so damn small, but it's also kind of Expensive.  If I had my
choice, I'd want CF, because it's cheap, you can get lots of storage,
and my laptop will take CF directly.  My new camera uses MMC, though,
partly because it's fairly small.

My current camera I don't think they had much choice on it...  A CF card
is about as big as the battery -- they would have to have made the
camera significantly larger to fit a CF into it.

Sean
-- 
 "I was on IRC once and got mistaken for Dan Bernstein. I still have
 nightmares."  -- Donnie Barnes
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
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