Re: [BLUG] importance of media (was: recommendations on a good...)

Make sure the model you pick has a popular media, which is reasonably
cheap.

If you're thinking about a camera that doesn't have removable media, my
advice is to avoid it. There's nothing like having lost a USB cable and
a having full camera to spoil a special occassion. Also, while you may
think you'll always have your PC with you, it can really suck to find
yourself in the middle of a good time with friends/family (like at, say,
an amusement park) where you have access to your PC in the evening, but
the lack of a PC when your camera gets full prevents you from taking
a super-cute photo of a child/spouse.

SD seems to be the preferred media at this time. Some DVD players and
even televisions have direct support for SD cards. Note, though, there's
a sharp difference between normal SD cards and "Micro SD" cards. You
can, however, buy adapters allowing you to plug your Micro SD card in to
a machine accepting SD cards.

More than that, if your computer of choice doesn't already have built-in
support for the camera media, get yourself a USB-based adapter for it.
These should go for under/around $20.

You can now pop out the media from the camera, load it with a fresh
card, hand it back to the person taking pictures, and load the pictures
from the full card in to your computer.

Most cameras are writing JPGs (and MPG/AVI files) directly to the media.
(This is as opposed to using a proprietary format which later needs to
be converted to a standard format.) Most systems will detect media cards
and deal with importing the photos reasonably, though it is possible to
traverse the filesystem and copy files off manually.

Note: If you delete photos in-camera you can get photos out-of-order
(depending on model), otherwise copying them from the card to the PC
should preserve order taken. This can happen whether you plug in the
media or the camera to the computer. (It can be bothersome if you don't
clean the card off regularly.)

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 03:16:48PM -0400, matthewzin@gmail.com wrote:
> I'd be interested in this info as well, particularly if there is one camera
> that is a little more Ubuntu friendlier than others. (Though I suspect this
> won't be much of an issue.)
> Thanks,
> Matt

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