Oleg, > I am considering getting a digital camera (for amateur, not > professional, use), with the obvious requirement that it will interact > flawlessly with my Linux computers (desktops and laptop).
I found that the best way to use a digital camera is to treat the memory cards as film. You buy several of them acording to your needs and replace one when it gets full. At the end of the day, week, whatever, you take your "film" and pop them in a card reader. Then you copy them to your hard disk, make backup CD's of them and delete the ones you don't want to keep. Note that I delete after backing up just to be sure. GIMP is an excelent photo editor. Photoshop is better because there are more features, more commercial plug-ins and better documentation. For home use, I doubt the $700 for Photoshop (plus a Windows PC or Mac) is worth it. If you don't have a printer get an EPSON one. After lots of research, I found that if you print a picture and view it a normal distance (1 foot for an A4), the cheapest EPSON (C20) would produce good photographs. Experimentation proved me right. :-) Also without going into the physics of it here (this is a linux group after all), a two million pixel camera is all that you need. The best MTF for pictures A4 or smaller with 2MP images. BTW, If you want to buy an interchangable lens camera the best is the Sigma SD-9. It uses a Foveon V3 sensor and it's 3mp pictures are better than a CCD or CMOS at 9mp-12mp. At $1600 (US price) it is a $1000 sensor, $300 worth of electronics and $300 worth of camera. In plain English, great sensor, few features, ok camera. Canon just anounced a $1200 (US list price) EOS-300D. which has lots of features but a CMOS or CCD sensor (I think Canon prefers CMOS to CCD, but I'm not sure). You can get a small USB reader for about 150 NIS or less. Make sure that it either has Linux support listed on the package, or you can return it. The reader I bought did not and works only under windows. That's because it requires microcode to be downloaded for it and the microcode is a copyghighted windows DLL. Someone did a good job of writing a driver for it, but never got around the DLL issue. :-( Once mounted in a USB reader it looks like a big floppy drive. The pictures are stored as files and you can copy them with cp, etc. You can remove them with rm. Another point is to make sure that the file format can be read by an open program. Most cameras will write files in JPEG, though some use a closed, undocumented raw format. Nikon's top of the line cameras do both, the lower ones use JPEG. I can give you one warning. HP digital cameras do not like immersion in artificialy flavored oversweetened fruit drink. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 972-54-608-069 Icq/AIM Uin: 2661079 MSN IM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Not for email) Carp are bottom feeders, koi are too, and not surprisingly are ferrets. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
