[Gllug] Digital Cameras

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2002-06-05 at 11:07, Richard Cottrill wrote:

> Hi peoples,
> 
> I'm toying with buying a digital camera. What sorts of things do I need to
> look for to ensure I can use them with Linux? Are there some open standards
> that describe camera/PC interaction? The thing I'm most worried about is
> uploading/downloading/deleting pictures on the media (Smart Media, Compact
> Flash, etc) or internal memory (God forbid). It would be ideal if I could
> use the camera as a media reader or just use some generic media interface to
> my PC (e.g.: a USB multi format reader).

I recently bought myself a Canon Powershot S40. 4 Megapixel, does JPEG
and Canon RAW files, MPEG movie clips at 320x240, Compact Flash,
Lithium-Ion rechargable battery. I bought it from Dixons, mostly because
they said if I didn't like it, I had 3 months to return it, so I got to
play with it and Linux.

Anyway, gphoto2 (cvs) has support for it, so I grabbed that and use
gtkam to download the pictures. JPEG's are very good quality, RAW files
are also available. RAW file format is losslessly compressed sensor
data, and ther is a Linux util for converting Canon RAW files written by
a guy called David Coffin. RAW support is not (yet) as good as windows,
but there is significant interest, and the format has been mostly
reverse-engineered. The only thing missing is EXIF support (which is a
load of info like exposure/focal length/aperture/date, stuck into the
JPEG)- EXIF info can be got at under Linux with the JPEG's (google for
jhead), but not yet with the RAW files. I can rotate images on the
camera (this actually just sets a tag in the EXIF header), and after
downloading, I run a shell script over the directory, which uses
jpegtran to automatically losslessly rotate the image to the correct
orientation, using the EXIF header. The movies play fine with mplayer.

Not so great - there's no flash hotshoe for an external flash, and the
camera has an image stitch mode, which uses a windows program to
"finish" the stitching, but those are about my only complaints. I
haven't tried the stitch mode yet, so it might work OK even without the
'doze prog - the camera does a lot of the work itself.

I've used two Olympus digital cameras at work. They're not bad cameras,
but they use SmartMedia (uggh). Newer Olympus's tend to act as usb
mass-storage devices, so should "just work" with Linux. I've not tested
that theory, but have used one with Win2k pro (3020Z, I think), and did
not need to install a driver.

Anyway, check out www.dpreview.com for digicam reviews, and
rec.photo.digital has quite a few Linux users lurking.

HTH,

Mike.


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