I am looking for a camera which will be used by a large group of people. Do you have any suggestions on camera's which are easy to use and provide an easy and versital method of getting the images out of the camera? I would like to avoid a camera which requires deticated drives or software to get the data out.

Thanks,

Joe Vandenburg.

-- Joe Vandenburg (joseph_vandenburg@agilent.com), August 15, 2000

Answers

Tough one...

Windows, Mac, or both? And would you like chips with that? ;-)

USB is getting to be pretty universal(at least on Win98 machines), but the camera's driver has to be installed on each machine you wish to use it with, as far as I know. Not a big deal really, it's only a one time thing and a disk can be carried if it needs to be installed on other machines when traveling or being handed off.

The installation is generally a no brainer. Usually you just turn the camera on, and plug it into the USB port. Win 98 picks up the new hardware and pops up an Installing New Hardware window. You pop in the disk and tell Win98 what drive to look in for the disk. Bing, bang, boom. You're done. From then on whenever you plug the camera(which usually must be turned on first) into the USB port it'll pop up as another drive on the Win '98 Explorer program. Then you simply highlight the files on the camera and drag 'em onto a new folder on the PC's drive. Pretty simple.

I have a Toshiba PDR-M70 that'll do this via USB, but it also comes with a program called Image Expert which can help do the downloading and handles simple editing, and with a $29 upgrade, can do a lot more in terms of image management and editing. Another advantage, if it might be used with laptops, is that you can get a smartmedia to pcmcia adapter and plug the memory card into your laptop where it will once again appear as a drive.

Sony makes floppy based cameras, but they have very high compression ratios because of the limit imposed by storing images on a 1.44MB floppy, which tends to lead to poor image quality.

Sony also makes a CD1000 camera which uses a 3" CDR disk to save images, but there is something of a learning curve in that one must close out a session in order to remove the disk and read it in a normal PC with CD drive. I think it also has USB so that could be a good feature.

It's really hard to find a digital that produces impressive images, but doesn't involve something in the way of an installation. It's just that there really is no firm standard in Win '98. It's just not universal. In an ideal world, you'd be able to plug anything into a USB port and the device would be able to tell the PC what it is and how to communicate with it. In the real world, it jest tain't thet simple...

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@surferz.net), August 15, 2000.