[PLUG] Digital camera -- wrong choice?

[Daniel Johnson]

> But subsequent reading about other Canon models and Linux support has me
> wondering if that's a safe assumption.  It seems that not all model
> upgrades necessarily are supported, even when it seems like they would
> be.  I can still stop the order and make another choice if I don't
> dawdle.  Does anyone with more experience in the camera/Linux
> compatibility arena have any advice about what I should do?
>
> If I understand what I've read correctly, is it true that another option
> would be to get a card reader and not worry about whether the camera
> itself is compatible, because I can just upload the photos from the
> memory card via USB?

I have a Cannon Power Shot A70.  I did a bunch of research on Linux,
and digital cameras a while ago.  There are basically two support
issues one of which I haven't seen in this thread yet.

The first one camera compatibility with Linux has not been a problem
with me.  This comes in one of three flavors.  gphoto2 support.  When
cameras first came out everyone had their own driver.  Now there is a
standard driver that most cameras use.  It is usually either called
PTP (picture transfer protocol), or pictbridge.  I think it is better
than USB mass storage because it doesn't depend on the computer
supporting the filesystem used on the memory card.  This isn't much of
an issue now as everyone is using fat, but fat has known limitations,
and as the memory cards start getting big enough to make these
limitations an issue I expect different filesystems to start being
used.  Many cameras let you switch between USB mass storage mode, and
PTP mode.  PTP also lets you download thumbnails without downloading
the whole image, and has a variety of other features.  Some Canon
cameras let you use the PTP interface to trigger the camera to take a
picture.  So the first to camera compatibility methods are PTP, and
USB mass storage.  The third method discussed here is memory card
readers.

The second compatibility issue is support for the camera's raw data
format.  Cameras do various tweaks on the data before saving images.
Kind of an automatic photo retouch.  Professionals mostly use the raw
data format of the camera which is much better for post process
manipulation.  More info about that here.  [1]

In any case I just plug in my camera, and I get a popup in Linux that
asks me if I want to import photos, and it just works.  When I first
used my camera it was a big headache, but that's all fixed now.

I hope this helps a little

[1] http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/