[NBLUG/talk] Digital cameras

Troy Arnold troy at zenux.net
Fri Jan 20 00:19:47 PST 2006


On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:01:22PM -0800, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 10:02:47PM -0800, Kyle Rankin wrote:
> > Almost every camera I've seen nowadays act as a usb storage device when you
> > hook it up to a computer whether it's Windows, Mac, or Linux, so you can
> > treat it just like a usb hard drive and copy the files off of it. Basically
> > I'd recommend finding the camera you like first, then doing a bit of
> > research to see if it acts as a usb storage device. Chances are it does.
> 
> And if that doesn't work, just pick one that has removable media that
> you can use easily under Linux (e.g., FAT-formatted Compact Flash, which
> you can access as a removable drive using an inexpensive USB reader or,
> in laptops, for example, a CF->PCMCIA adapter.)

Well, there are other issues.  Some cameras use proprietary RAW formats.
If you're going to shoot jpeg's, then yeah, pretty much anything will work
these days.  If you want RAW, then you(they) may need to do more homework.

I don't really know much about this subject, but I played around with dcraw[*]
and found the results underwhelming with a Nikon D70.  Someone I had a
conversation with this week explained this was because Nikon's software performs
noise reduction on the image, and dcraw doesn't have access to all the info
that Nikon's windoze software does.

* http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/

This link provides an overview and solutions to some of the problems with
RAW capable camera's.  Warning, there are a couple of MB of photos on this
page :-/

http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/pepe/d70/Nikon_D70_on_Linux.html


-troy




More information about the talk mailing list