On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 12:21:20PM -0400, Hall Stevenson wrote: | > Addressing other comments in this thread, I too | > considered getting a floppy based camera, since | > floppys are obviously portable to Linux. I rejected | > that idea because it would be a slow, cumbersome | > way to handle that much data. I looked for a | > camera that communicated via a serial interface. | | We *had* a serial cable based camera in my department at work. | It wasn't too bad, but we switched to a floppy-based one. | [ Why ?? ] Hall, I pity your working environment ;-).
My dad has a Kodak DC-220 that he is happy with. It uses Compact Flash memory, so he can take a lot of pictures quickly without switching storage medium. He was using the paralell (or serial, I don't remember exactly) port to transfer the pictures (Win95, now Win98) to his computer. For christmas he got the thing Kodak makes that allows you to plug the memory in and simply view using explorer. It is neat, and much faster. He got the parallel port version because the old box he had then couldn't support USB (ever see an ISA USB expansion card?). That device is also available in a USB format. A friend of ours has a DC-210 that he likes. It takes the same kind of memory. He uses Windows, though, not Linux. Another friend has an external adapter for his computer that allows PCMCIA cards to be attached (this is a desktop, not a laptop). He also has a little adapter that the Compact Flash plugs into that provides a PCMCIA sized connector to insert into the PCMCIA adapter. He was also using Windows, but it was pretty neat. I think the idea of a removable media based camera is neat because the media can be removed and inserted into a computer to share stuff pretty quickly. I think floppies are a bit big (physically) and small (storage-wise) and supposedly unreliable. I suggest checking Linux USB compatibility for using the various adapters and connectors to hook the camera up to the computer. HTH, -D
