digital camera questions.

[skeletal29]

ok well i would like to buy a camera but how do i know what is supported?

I was thinking of getting one that uses those digital media cards and get the reader that works with usb and jsut download offa that?

what would you suggest?
_________________
omp:
1.2ghz @ 1.32 Amd Athlon
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP Motherboard
256 Mb Samsung PC-2700 Ram
80 GbMAXTOR 6L080J4
LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163
Os: Gentoo Linux.

[/]

I have a Canon Powershot S40, and apart from it being a great camera it also works flawlessly under Linux.
My suggestion though is to not let Linux compatibility determine what camera to buy. Get one that has the features you want at a price you can pay. Then look into how you're going to use them with your system. But do get one that uses USB as PC connector.

Basically there are three ways to go about getting your pictures from your camera to your computer, depending on your camera not all may be available to you

1: Use an external reader, or a PCMCIA adapter to read the media (compact flash etc.) on your PC. My experience with compact flash on my laptop (with a PCMCIA adapter) was good. Just don't forget to unmount before you eject the card

2: A lot of cameras act as a USB external storage device when atached to your computer. Read more about that here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/USB-Digital-Camera-HOWTO/


3: Connect your camera to your PC and use software that can talk to it. This method will become more and more usuefull as the number of cameras using standard PTP (Picture transfer Protocol), and thus supported by gphoto2 increases.
What you need here is gphoto2. Have a look at their website: http://www.gphoto.org
I installed it using emerge gphoto2. this gives you a command line interface.

I also configured hotplugging so that it recognizes the camera when it is atached and loads the necessary drivers.

Once you get that all you need to do is gphoto2 -L to list all the pictures in you camera, and gphoto2 -P to download them all to your current dir... You kan even go further and use the Kamera kioslave under KDE. that way you can just browse your camera using Konqueror once it is connected.

You can find a lot of info about which cameras work under Linux (with links to tips) here:
/http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdevcat.php?id=10

[vod]

christ.! I have recently bought a cannon powershot S40 also. It's a wonderful camera.
It works really well with kde. Right now I use a program called digiKam (kde app). But i hear that even konqueror can access digital cameras.
I second the recommendation for the powershot S40
I just plug the sucker into my usb port directly, fire up digikam and voila!.
Plug and play baby.

[elzbal]

I agree with "/". Don't look at Linux compatability... look at quality (1), features (3), and price (2). I have an Olympus C-4000 that I just *love*. However, it does not support a complete USB protocol and is not directly readable by Linux.

Does this matter to me? Not a bit!

I just picked up an inexpensive USB card reader (from SmartDisk) and away I go! (This also has the advantage of not running down batteries when downloading/viewing pictures on my linux box.)

Anyway, good luck with the camera!

[patkc66]