On Saturday 19 January 2002 06:56, Andy R wrote:
> Hello all. I'm going to buy a digital camera soon, and
> I don't know much about them at all. I'd like it to be
> flexible on the storage side and I don't care too much
> about image quality because I think they are getting
> pretty good. Does anyone have any particular camera
> that they like? If possible, I'd like to use an IBM
> microdrive in it... I'd also like to use one of those
> USB card readers that you can plug in and mount the
> memory card like a filesystem if that's possible.
> 
> I'd also like to get a scanner. I see that xsane
> supports a lot of things, but if anyone has any
> pointers or gotchas on those, I'd appreciate it too.

A good digital camera that I like particularly is the Olympus C3040-Zoom. 
Its USB driver is a USB Mass Storage generic one, so for example to get it 
working under Linux all you need is SCSI support, the USB-Storage driver, 
and a bit of patience to get the options and mods compiled into the kernel 
properly. I'm still fiddling under NetBSD so I don't have any information 
there for you. I don't imagine it'd be hard. :)

Because it uses no proprietary communications you can get it working just 
about everywhere. It's really cool.

Features I really like:
x. Audio/Video out to a TV via RCA cabling (good quality!)
x. Nice little remote control
x. Low-res movie recording with sound
x. 32MB on-board for fast picture snapping
x. Superb on battery life. A week-long trip is nothing for it.
x. Option to record 5 sec of sound for each photo (has mic-in jack)
x. Everything (really!) controllable via the setup. If you want a web-cam, 
this is really easy to set up as one and you can turn off the auto-off 
feature. (Still need a capture board in place.)
x. Photographic quality is superb
x. Exposure ranges from 16" to 1/10000
x. adjustable aperture (!)
x. lossless picture compression for those ultra-high-res shots you don't 
want jpeg artifacts in
x. extremely bright and high-resolution LCD--very nice!
x. VERY configurable shoot settings--black and white, sepia-toning, over- 
and under-exposure, all sorts of neat sharpness and contrast effects, 
high-quality white balance, etc etc etc
x. smart-media wafers have a definite geek-factor advantage over CF- and 
CF2-type storage.
x. Simple disk-like USB connectors can be used to use the smart-media 
wafers like normal disks--you can do the same thing with the USB connector 
on the camera itself, so no big deal

Features I Don't Like:
x. AC adaptor isn't included (argh!) and power requirements are extremely 
hard to find to make universal adaptor substitutions
x. Manually focussing is a real Pain In The Butt
x. Sometimes options are hidden too many levels deep in the setup menus to 
be useful on-the-fly.
x. turning off the flash detracts visibly from image quality in 
lower-light conditions, regardless of camera steadiness and exposure 
settings
x. quality settings in movie mode are limited
x. bracket-shooting is very difficult for a novice like me
x. Maximum size of the smart-media that I've seen is 64MB in my area

Why IBM Microdrives are a waste except in hand-helds:
x. They are more expensive than buying equivalent amounts of smart-media 
or CF storage
x. They generate a great deal of heat and this sometimes causes problems 
in heat-sensitive camera or outdoors shots where the difference between 
the hot microdrive and the cold camera causes condensation on either the 
internals or (worse) the lens mechanisms
x. you can buy equivalent alternative storage devices to store multiple 
gigs of data--they're these cool stick-things that you can hook into the 
smart-media and automatically download the entire contents. And these 
devices are much cheaper than microdrives.
x. Microdrives EAT POWER! Some models suck down enough power to half or 
third the life of your camera, even with high-powered Ni-MH rechargeables.

For your scanners, just make sure you get SCSI and not parallel. Parallel 
is a *real bitch* to get running under sane. Most (if not all) SCSI 
scanners work wonderfully with sane.

ttyl,
sudog