Super Lowend Digital Cameras
Kirk Is
Visiting London, I bought a "Digi Precision" toy digital camera, for 20
quid (a bit over 32 bucks american) It takes 352x288 images, that look
ok-ish if you shrink 'em to half that size with a decent resizing/
resampling algorithm, like Irfanview has. Even though I have a very decent
very portable camera already, I bought it for two reasons: it's tiny,
about the size of a matchbox, and the case is transparent, and you can see
all it is a circuit board, a pizeo buzzer on one side, the lens assembly
on the other (about the same size as the buzzer), a two character LCD
screen, some buttons, a place for its single AAA battery. Also, I'm a
sucker for extreme-lowend video technology.
I was surprised that I could barely find any information on this camera
via Google. I'm thinking about starting a fan page for it, and giving a
better set of instructions than the one that came with it, which were
translated ok, but extremely poorly laid out.
It comes with a TWAIN plugin/downloader program which is an awful piece of
crap. Once I'm home I want to see if i can do a better job with using it
in Paint Shop Pro (irfanview didn't handle multiple image acquire) but
standalone, it tends to save things as BMPs, for heaven's sake. I'd love
to find a better program but i don't know if there is one; and I don't
know enough about TWAIN to know if it wold be plausible to roll one's own,
maybe save JPGs directly.
Any ideas/thoughts?
ObHack:
I've been having a lot of camera difficulties lately. I just bought a
Canon PowerShot S200 to replace the battered PowerShot S110 (basically the
same camera, minus a few minor features) that I've been carrying around in
my hip pocket for 2 years...hence the batterment.
But I was suspicious...the newer camera sometimes goes into "blackout"
mode, where it's picking up just black from the lens. The screen is fine,
I can use the menus and screen display, but unless I want to convince
people Germany and England were just very, very dark, it's not much good
for pictures. And this problem went from interminent to fulltime on the
trip.
Luckily I brought the old S110. And they use the same batteries and
memory. The trouble is the batterment...the main shutter button falls
out. The hack is what's keeping it on, a big yellow rubberband. It's not
perfect, I have to be careful of the band getting rolled off the criticial
point of the camera when removing it from my pocket, but its held up
pretty well and let me take over 500 pictures this trip.
I know the lesson is I should be using a case in my pocket. Maybe I should
look at the Casio Exilim, which is about 1/3 the width of thee Canon
model, and could fit into the pocket with case included with no problem.
--
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