Void's Forums

i'm going to buy a digital camera. ideally it will work perfectly in a modern linux (in fact rh9 but hopefully others too) and as a bonus it would work in windows and macOSX too to keep options open as possible, so...

do you own a digitaql camera with hardware zoom etc that works perfectly in linux? if so what make and model is it and what are its upsides and downsides? this'll give me an idea of which models to look out for.

thanks in advance etc...

I did have one up until recently. I made the mistake of giving it back to the company I used to work for (it was theirs that was on semi-permanant loan to me). It worked perfectly in all operating systems because it had a built in floppy drive. It was a Sony Mavica and it was really nice. Of course it would be quite old by now and with the resolution of today's cameras a floppy disk just wouldn't cut it. So I'm actually in the market for one at the moment myself and am interested in hearing the suggestions. Let me know what you end up getting and how you like it.

I do have a Sony digital video camera that I like and it works well under Linux using firewire. I can't access the memory stick in Linux though. But that's ok because the image quality on memory stick images isn't worth saving anyway. I need a digital camera in addition to the video camera.

well i think i saw somewhere that a newer sony mavica had a built in 80mm CDRW so maybe that is a good choice indeed.

Yeah, I've seen the CD writer ones. That would be very cool, especially if it also had a large amount of built in buffer memory so it could delay writes to the CD. The only problem I see with them is they would be larger than other cameras.

VoidMain,

I find the Sony cameras pretty rich in features and robust.....Check out the great resource on digital cameras here:-

http://dpreview.com/

007

Void Main wrote:Yeah, I've seen the CD writer ones. That would be very cool, especially if it also had a large amount of built in buffer memory so it could delay writes to the CD. The only problem I see with them is they would be larger than other cameras.

well this sony mavica cd500 is supposed to take 3 1/2 inch CDs (which i am sure i don't need to tell you is the same size as a floppy disk) so it would probably be 3 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches (or more likely 3 1/2 inches square), of course what with my tray loading cd drives i would have to get plastic 3 to 5 inch adaptor blanks to put the CDs in if i wanted to stick them in the PC. that and the blank cdrws will have to be sourced from somewhere, i imagine they might be difficult/expensive to buy...

For what it's worth... I've used two Sony Mavica digital cameras; the ones that write to floppies, and have been quite happy with them. I'm too cheap/poor/whatever to actually buy one but I got them through my job to take pictures for my employer's web site. This was a "side duty" and I backed out of it when I could no longer telnet directly to the server and write the HTML in vi and just FTP my .jpeg files up to it. But the cameras were really nice, and I still use one at work for other purposes.

One thing that I really like about them is that disks are cheap and readily available and images can be transferred easily to any computer without having to worry about having any fancy software or other stuff. I bought one of my daughters a fancy Olympus camera and gtcam doesn't support it so she can only transfer her images to a WIndows computer. This is one of the really crappy reasons I still have a WIndows computer in my house.

Just my $.02.

Jim

edit

My daughter's camera is an Olympus D-550 Zoom. I'll post the model of my Sony tomorrow when I get to work.

my friend has a coolpix, i'm not sure what model. it works perfectly in redhat 9 with very nice resolution and zoom(hardware and software).

Not sure how helpfull that is though.

I have an HP photosmart c500/600/912 (you pick) It works great with Digikam

The entire photosmart line is compatible (I think) or atleast most of it.

My camera has zoom, and a little LCD screen, and delete function.

its about a year old.

The great thing about using CD-R/RW media for cameras is that they can be popped into any computer without having to worry about USB support etc...all one needs is an OS and cd-rom drive to copy the stuff whereever needed. I think SONY is the only camera using the CD system of storage. The picture quality is great too!

007

well this sony mavica cd500 is supposed to take 3 1/2 inch CDs (which i am sure i don't need to tell you is the same size as a floppy disk) so it would probably be 3 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches (or more likely 3 1/2 inches square), of course what with my tray loading cd drives i would have to get plastic 3 to 5 inch adaptor blanks to put the CDs in if i wanted to stick them in the PC. that and the blank cdrws will have to be sourced from somewhere, i imagine they might be difficult/expensive to buy...

Hello people!!! Long time no see! I'm so glad to see that Void's forums are picking up and let me get straight to Calum's question. I recently bought an HP Photosmart 120. It's needless to say that it works almost perfectly with SuSE Linux 8.2 which I've been using for some time now. And I say almost perfectly because I have to set it up (before plugging it into the USB port of my laptop) to work as a hard drive. When set up like this and then plugged into the USB port KDE pops up a hard drive icon and I'm able to see the contents of the camera just fine. Hope that helps a bit

well after much confusing info, it looks like i might be going for a HP Photosmart 735, now i have done a bit of searching to try and ascertain if the bugger will work under RH9, but am still a little unsure. The gphoto2 compatibility list says these cameras are supported:

"HP PhotoSmart"
"HP PhotoSmart 318 (PTP mode)" (TESTING)
"HP PhotoSmart 612 (PTP mode)" (TESTING)
"HP PhotoSmart 715 (PTP mode)" (TESTING)
"HP PhotoSmart C20"
"HP PhotoSmart C200"
"HP PhotoSmart C30"
"HP PhotoSmart C500/618/912"

so does this mean yes or no?
also from what i can tell the storage is 16MB internal, and the camera connects via the USB slot. This seems to be one of the ones HP are saying can print by connecting it directly to a special HP printer. Anyway, i still haven't found a list of cameras which can use the 'usb-storage' driver not surprisingly, so i thought i'd come back on here and ask if anybody can yea or nay this particular model.
thanks in advance etc etc etc...

Ok, I finally went out and bought a new camera myself. I got the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P32. It's a relatively inexpensive camera with some nice features. It comes with a 16MB memory stick but I went ahead and bought the 128MB stick. It also comes with the USB cable, video cables, batteries and charger. I also went ahead and bought one of those 15 minute MiMH chargers and some 2000MaH batteries to go along with it but from what I can tell this camera seems to run insanely long on just 2 AA batteries (I just picked it up this evening).

I couldn't mount the camera with a stock Red Hat built kernel. I had to make the slightest of changes to one of the USB kernel source files and recompiled the kernel and now it mounts the camera just fine. In fact kudzu set up a /mnt/camera mount point and added the /etc/fstab entry for me. Works like a champ and I am very happy with it so far! If you get one of these cameras I can save you a little pain and give you the short step by step procedure to hack you kernel to make this camera work. As far as I can tell any 2.4.2x kernel will need to be hacked, not sure about the 2.5.x or 2.6.x kernels. But I would stick with 2.4.20-20.9 for RH9 (at the time of this writing).

Cool my mums HP works fine with gphoto and stuff, so i love it.

Calum wrote:well after much confusing info, it looks like i might be going for a HP Photosmart 735, now i have done a bit of searching to try and ascertain if the bugger will work under RH9, but am still a little unsure. The gphoto2 compatibility list says these cameras are supported:

"HP PhotoSmart"
"HP PhotoSmart 318 (PTP mode)" (TESTING)
"HP PhotoSmart 612 (PTP mode)" (TESTING)
"HP PhotoSmart 715 (PTP mode)" (TESTING)
"HP PhotoSmart C20"
"HP PhotoSmart C200"
"HP PhotoSmart C30"
"HP PhotoSmart C500/618/912"

so does this mean yes or no?
also from what i can tell the storage is 16MB internal, and the camera connects via the USB slot. This seems to be one of the ones HP are saying can print by connecting it directly to a special HP printer. Anyway, i still haven't found a list of cameras which can use the 'usb-storage' driver not surprisingly, so i thought i'd come back on here and ask if anybody can yea or nay this particular model.
thanks in advance etc etc etc...

It should work with any HP USB Printer, we do it at school with them, its like Nokia's Phone Monopoly that is currently been shaken by Vodaphone Live, etc.

They need to Standardise both before I get a new printer, or a hpone for that matter.