On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 01:46:27PM +0000, Ian Bell wrote:

I want to buy and inexpensive digital camera from which I can capture pictures on my PC via USB. 2 megapixels will do me but of course I want it to be linux friendly. Any recommendations?

I have a Canon powershot A40 its good it cost me about £200 nearly a year ago now and uses Compact Flash cards which are cheap and 4AA batteries (so its quite heavy which is about the only downside) I got a few sets of rechargable AAs and a charger and keep a set of non-rechargables on me as the rechargables can die on you very suddenly.

I really like my A40 (like all Canons I have used, I also have a Canon SLR film camera) its build quality is good and the picture quality is really fantastic.

One thing I can say is "avoid Kodak" my brother got one of their cameras through the infamous "£300 quid camera for £100, ooops we made a big mistake" event, the image quality was worse than his £120 fuji camera. I think he sold it on Ebay very quickly afterwards.

You havn't defined inexpensive BTW. What I have I am guessing would cost about £250 quid now with a couple of decent sized flash cards and some rechargables+charger. Make sure you look at the costs of batteries before buying a camera and what kind of memory it uses as some of the cheaper cameras can be expensive to run as they use expensive memory modules and proprietary batteries!

You will probably be better off looking at whats in your price range, seeing if its supported (read below) checking out its running costs and then reading camera websites and newsgroups to make your descision based on picture quality and ease of use etc.

Anyhow from the Linux point of view there are two main types of camera, those which appear as a "USB mass storage device" these you plug in and they appear as a disk with all of your files on which is very handy, this is a feature my Canon does not have =( although I could get a flash reader to do the same.

The other option is to use gphoto2 which is what I have to do with my camera http://gphoto.sourceforge.net/ although this can be a pain to get running when you have the latest camera and only the CVS beta has support (bitter painful experience ;)) so you may want to double check that when it says supported it doesn't really mean "download recompile about 4 times and then download other bits to recompile that it depends on" although this should only be a problem with very new cameras, like my A40 was at the time.

Gphoto2 is very good and supports about 300 cameras apparently, with that list you should perhaps get some good pointers.

Adam