I want to get a digicam for my wife for her B.D. I have been looking at the Oly 500L, but I am wondering how important a direct hookup to a T.V. might be? I know it would depend on everyones own needs, but does anyone have a comment on this subject? I am also wondering if I can download image to an older laptop 486dx2 50 running win 3.1 using a floppy adapter. Most of the ads I see are telling me I need win95.

-- John (ifunone@aol.com), May 07, 1998

Answers

Regarding your question about the usefulness of TV output from a digital camera:

It is definitely dependant on what you are going to use the camera for. Here is my two cents. I have a Kodak DC210, and we also have one at work. At work, I find the TV output useful to quickly display photos in meetings and design reviews. If your a traveling salesperson, I could see using the TV output to show pictures of your products to customers. On the home front, I take pictures of family events, and show them to my 92 year old grandfather, who isn't always up to traveling to attend family events. It's also good for quickly checking the exposure, focus, and composition of your pictures, without spending the time to download them to your computer. TV output was one of my selection criteria when I was shopping for a camera. I didn't realize how useful it would turn out to be.

Re the floppy adapter:

I believe that the floppy adapter will work on any operating system that can read a DOS FAT formatted floppy. This is one of the advantages of the adapter. I have not tried one out yet to see how fast they are. Another option is to get a PCMCIA adapter for the Compact Flash card that your camera uses to store the pictures. (~$20) You can simply pop the flash card into your laptop's PCMCIA card slot and download the pictures from the card to your HD. This is very fast, probably faster than the floppy adapter. On my Kodak camera, and I believe most camera's, the flash card uses the DOS FAT file structure, (the same as your PC's HD) and stores files in .jpg file format. (Kodak also has an optional Flash Pix .fpx file format)

Hope this was helpful.

-- Jeff Henderson (jphender@ix.netcom.com), May 14, 1998.

Here is an interesting use for the NTSC video out of some digital cameras:

I have used a "Snappy" still image video capture device for a couple of years. Up to this point I have used it with an 8mm video camera and have experienced very good results. One of the features of the Snappy is its ability to take a video signal and over-sample the image to 'increase' its resolution. The results are very satisfying.

I have a question into Play inc. at this time regarding whether this function is also effective with digital cameras with NTSC output (it should be). If it works this way, then you could take lower resolution images and enhance them with the Snappy. This would be great when on vacation or at an event where you will want to take more pics than usual. You can get many more pics in memory that way.

You can also copy images from the camera onto a video tape to send to Aunt Mary in Idaho while her PentiumII 400 is in the shop.

-- Randy Glass (frcn@cncnet.com), May 23, 1998.

I have found the the "TV" output is very helpful when you travel. I would not consider a camera without it. I use it in the hotel/motel to review what I took that day. Motel TVs rarely have video inputs, but RF converters are quite cheap ( Radio Shack ). I like the Digita; Camera's instant display of the image which is lacking in all but Polaroid analog photography, but I also want the ability to see the image as a 11x14 before I have lost the chance to repeat it.

-- Bill Hogan (wbfh@inland.net), July 02, 1998.