[Techtalk] Recommendations for digital cameras

[Akkana Peck]

I have an Olympus C700 and a Minolta Dimage Xt. They both work fine
as usb-storage devices on Linux. It doesn't seem to use up much
battery to use the camera to upload images, so I usually do that
though I also have external readers for both the SD (Minolta) and
SM (Olympus) cards.

I'm happy with both cameras: the Olympus has a 10x zoom and I use
it for bird and wildlife shots (though I'm lusting after one of
those new 12x zoom Panasonics with the manual focus ring) while
the Minolta is tiny and has a few features most tiny cameras don't:
it has a relatively fast lens (f2.8) and can take relatively long
night exposures, and it does good macros without needing to be
switched into a special "macro mode" (which means that I don't
take the next 20 scenic shots out of focus because I forgot to
switch out of macro mode).

Before the Minolta my "pocket camera" was a Canon Elph S200. It
isn't a usb-storage device. gphoto2 could handle it, but I found
gphoto2 a real hassle to use -- it made it difficult to do my
normal "upload all images from the camera and remove them from
the camera". So I ended up using an external USB CF card reader.

I got rid of the Canon because I wasn't happy with the image quality.
My husband inherited it, but he eventually got dissatisfied with
the quality too. Now he has a Sony DSC-W5. He says it doesn't work
with Linux. He uses a USB memory stick reader. He loves the W5.

All of the above cameras take videos in formats that can be read by
at least some Linux video programs.

I also have a $20 Aiptek Pencam for taking places I don't want
to take an expensive camera (like kayaking).  I have NOT managed to
get it talking to Linux, so I use an external SD reader. I also
haven't managed to view its videos in Ubuntu, but admittedly Ubuntu
isn't very good at video; I keep meaning to try some other distros.
Image quality isn't very good anyway -- the sensor seems to be
mounted at an angle, so one corner of all photos is out of focus.
I'm told there's some way to adjust this but haven't opened the
camera up yet to try it.

Mary writes:
> This has been the case for some years now. The big thing to watch out
> for is the odd manufacturer who use a custom file format. Almost all use
> JPG or TIFF, which is fine. Manufacturer's custom file formats are often
> heavily locked down and Linux programs may not be able to read them. But

Most cameras use JPEG by default, but have an option of a
proprietary "raw" format. If you're happy using JPEG, you're
probably fine, but if you want to shoot in raw mode then you
should definitely research the Linux support for that manufacturer's
format before buying. Some raw formats are much better supported than
others, some aren't supported at all, and some manufacturers use a
semi-standard format like tiff for uncompressed images.

agoats writes:
> card readers. The jpegs are in a different format XIF, which you will
> need to get the library for in order to view the pix.

Perhaps EXIF? That's the format most cameras use to record
details like time, date, and exposure info in a JPEG image
(the image is still JPEG format, though).
"jhead" is a terrific commandline program for viewing or altering
exif, though there's a newer program called simply "exif" which is
fine too. You can make your images quite a bit smaller by removing
unneeded parts of the exif like the embedded thumbnail the camera
uses to show the picture on its own screen -- I run jhead -dt 
over any image I upload to the web.

	...Akkana