rauch@eecs.ukans.edu (Richard Rauch) writes:
>  * Ultimately, I settled on an Olympus D-360L.  It supported the
>    features that I wanted, was supposedly supported by gPhoto, and
>    had a USB option.  (I haven't picked up the USB option.)

Welcome to the ranks of the digital camera owners.  Now you too can
have all your friends cringe whenever you show up with the camera. ;-)

The Olympus is one of 30 or so Sierra Designs cameras.  All of these
cameras use what is essentially the same on-the-wire protocol both on
the rs-232 and on the USB.  I wouldn't expect much hacking would be
needed to get rs-232 side working.  As all single-company protocols
seem to do, this one changes on a whim.  Expect to do some minor
tweaking on the code.  (I've had my Oly 320 for 3 years now and have
been a happy user of photopc.)

>    There are options to let you use its media with a floppy disk
>    drive (I don't have one in my main computer) or PCMCIA (again,
>    I don't have one).

The floppy is adaptor is almost certainly a joke that some engineer
pulled on a marketing dept. that just didn't "get it".  The adaptor
consists of a "smartmedia" reader, some electronics, a battery and to
a "transmitting" coil that sends the flash-cards bits out to the head
of a floppy-disk drive.  The floppy drive thinks it is talking to
rotating media, but in reality is talking to a fixed inductor
pretending to be rotating media.  So yes, it is possible to read a
64MByte flash card as if it were a floppy, but I already get restless
when I have to write the occasional 1.44MB boot floppy.  I certainly
don't want to wait ~50x longer.  (Clearly the kernel floppy driver
also would need to know how to talk to this bastardized floppy.)

The pcmcia adaptors run at a much more respectable 1MByte/sec or more.

> The first rude shock is that our pkgsrc gPhoto, the same version that the
> gPhoto home page claims supports the 360, does NOT support the 360.  

You may also want to look at gphoto2 http://www.gphoto.org/gphoto2/ It
has support for quite a few more cameras (and in theory USB).  The USB
support for netbsd is still incomplete.  (I couldn't get gdb to
breakpoint the runtime-dynamic libs and the "insert printf and
recompile" game got old really quickly.  NB: gdb on nebsd-current
couldn't write the breakpoints.  That section of memory seemed to be
write-protected.)

> Second problem: The GIMP can't read the JPEG data files that photopc 2.80
> downloads from the 360. 

The jpeg "standard" is another tiff-like wrapper standard.  Think of
it as a file-system inside a file.  One can put any number of images
inside a single jpeg and can put all sorts of user information inside
the jpeg.  Do a strings on the file and you'll see that the camera has
even put the time, f-stop, shutter-speed etc into the jpeg for you.

> Misc. points: The batteries seem to run down quickly (4 double-A
> batteries).  

You can't use AA alkaline batteries with digital cameras.  The camera
takes 1 Amp to run.  There is no way in hell that AA alkalines will
put up with this sort of abuse for more than a minute.

The cheapest battery type that will work at 1 Amp drain rates in AA is
NiMH, which luckily is also rechargeable.  A fully charged NiMH AA set
will work for ~100 pictures.

-wolfgang
-- 
       Wolfgang Rupprecht <wolfgang+gnus@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com>
		    http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Coming soon: GPS mapping tools for Open Systems. http://www.gnomad-mapping.com/