[Wylug-discuss] Digital Camera Compatibility

[John Hodrien]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2011, Kenneth wrote:

> As far as I'm aware all cameras I've come across are just glorified Mass
> Storage devices as far as the computer is concerned. The best way to check
> is if it lists Windows 95/98 in the compatibility list. There's an outside
> chance it works as an MTP device, in which case there's plenty of
> applications which support it (F-Spot being one of them)

Personally I'd say this bit is far from true, with plenty of cameras not doing
that even now (of the five digital cameras I've owned, none have supported
Mass Storage).  All the cameras I've owned or tried to get photos off support
have supported PTP* (as supported by gphoto), but PTP/MTP can be a bit limited
in the way they work.  Certainly both of my digital SLRs have isses in PTP
mode and don't allow you to transfer RAW files.

But if you buy a random point and shoot, I'd happily assume that it'd support
PTP or Mass Storage (MS is probably ideal, but PTP is entirely tolerable under
linux).  Indeed point and click users potentially won't even notice the
difference.

Also as suggested already, get one that uses SD Card flash memory and you can
pop the card out and put it in your laptop.  This is the way I'd always tend
to offload shots from my cameras anyway, as it's usually faster, and doesn't
eat the batteries while you're downloading.  I'd avoid buying a camera that
used a proprietary memory format (like Sony with their Memory Stick Duo)
partly out of principal, but mostly for price and general compatibility with
other devices.  SD cards are silly cheap, keeping well below 1 pound per
gigabyte up to 32Gbytes if you shop around.

jh

* PTP's the older parent of MTP, but for a camera I'm not sure is meaningfully
   different.