Anyone got any recommendations or hints / tips for buying a digital camera. Looking at a budget of £100 - £150, for general all-round use - preferably fairly compact.
What should I look for when buying a camera for use with Linux? What are the main open source apps and what do they need the camera to support?
Is one that connects as a USB mass storage good enough? or should I expect more integration than that with the right camera?
Any recommended manufacturers which work best with open source software?
Amazon link recommendations welcome!
TIA,
Peter.
P.S. I'm running Debian Testing, if that makes a difference.
On 8/13/07, samwise samwise@bagshot-row.org wrote:
Anyone got any recommendations or hints / tips for buying a digital camera. Looking at a budget of £100 - £150, for general all-round use
- preferably fairly compact.
What should I look for when buying a camera for use with Linux? What are the main open source apps and what do they need the camera to support? Is one that connects as a USB mass storage good enough? or should I expect more integration than that with the right camera?
Unless you want to use the camera as a webcam (or otherwise control the camera from your PC), USB mass storage is all you need.
In your price range you are unlikely to be shooting in RAW format, so that is one less worry (not an actual problem as Canon, Nikon, Pentax, etc are mostly supported).
Any recommended manufacturers which work best with open source software?
USB mass storage and JPEGs - what more do you need?
I'd watch out for the physical memory storage format (compact flash, SD, etc) to make sure you have a reader for it (my camera phone uses the tiny Sony Memory Stick thingies which are safer to leave in the phone than to remove and then lose).
For reference I have an old and trusty Canon A40 (2MP, compact flash, JPEGs, not USB mass storage, is supported in Linux), a Pentax *ist-DL (6MP, SD, JPEGs and RAW, is USB mass storage, is supported in Linux), and a Sony Ericsson K800 (3MP, tiny Sony thingies, JPEGs, is USB mass storage, is supported in Linux).
Good luck! Tim.
"Tim Green" timothy.j.green@gmail.com wrote:
Unless you want to use the camera as a webcam (or otherwise control the camera from your PC), USB mass storage is all you need.
If I do want to use the camera as a webcam, probably for sip-started video with linphone, what would I need then?
(I've idly considered this a few times, but not tried it yet. I've two USB cameras here. Maybe one of them is capable.)
Thanks in advance,
samwise wrote:
Anyone got any recommendations or hints / tips for buying a digital camera. Looking at a budget of £100 - £150, for general all-round use
- preferably fairly compact.
Hi just a little tip about digital cameras,It always pays to buy one with a view finder as well as the screen. because in some conditions the screen is useless in setting up a photo(like very bright sunshine).a good model is the Powershot A 500 -600 series made by Cannon. I use a Cannon G6 which is slightly bulky but works with Ubuntu linux.5 million pixels should be enough for all but the professional,but higher specs are now available quite reasonably priced.
hope this helps Barry
On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 20:21 +0100, Barrys linux mail wrote:
samwise wrote:
Anyone got any recommendations or hints / tips for buying a digital camera. Looking at a budget of £100 - £150, for general all-round use
- preferably fairly compact.
Hi just a little tip about digital cameras,It always pays to buy one with a view finder as well as the screen. because in some conditions the screen is useless in setting up a photo(like very bright sunshine).a good model is the Powershot A 500 -600 series made by Cannon.
I have an A520 that I rescued from a wastepaper bin at a clients after it had been dropped (knocking the zoom mechanism out of alignment) and once repaired it took far better pictures than my original Pentax Optio S despite the paper specifications being very close.
Another thing I would watch for on this end of the market is shutter release response times...the Pentax in particular has a very annoying delay which makes it impossible to use for "action" shots. A pity as it is smaller and prettier than the Canon.
P.S. Never try and repair a digital camera unless you really don't care about being successful or not, I have taken a lot of things to bits in my time and managed to put most of them back together again, but that camera was a struggle.
The other thing is the speed of the auto focus - my Sony Cybershot 5mPixel is setup to autofocus on the "half press" of the "take the picture" button, it takes about .5 second to focus which has made for some bad action pictures not in focus!
I'll have to see if theres a "always focus" setting... hmmm
Others have said about the type of media the camera takes - also look at the price of comparable media ( Sony = Memory Stick Duo ) - I have a 1G which I get over 100 pictures on.
Also some do video too - limit resolution but OK for web or quick grabs when the minute could be lost.
I can bring it into work / Mondays ALUG meeting if you want.
Keith
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From: main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk on behalf of Wayne Stallwood Sent: Mon 13/08/2007 10:29 PM To: ALUG Subject: Re: [ALUG] Digital Camera recommendations
Another thing I would watch for on this end of the market is shutter release response times...the Pentax in particular has a very annoying delay which makes it impossible to use for "action" shots. A pity as it is smaller and prettier than the Canon.
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Barrys linux mail -
keith.jamieson＠bt.com -
MJ Ray -
samwise -
Tim Green -
Wayne Stallwood