Trying to understand about downloading images to your PC from a digital camera.

I have tried a floppy disk based one and it's a piece of cake. Also it's in JPEG format and there's no need for conversion software.

My question is that I've been researching and noticed that some have removable media and I want to download without using a parallel or serial port. How does the removable media work? Read that one camera you can get a floppy adapter. Does that mean you put the smart memory in the floppy adapter and then what? Do you need special software to download? Or is the images in JPEG format already with the smartmedia?

Thanks for any enlightenment.

-- Chuck Patt (snoopy221@hotmail.com), May 04, 2000

Answers

With your smartmedia card, the images will almost assuredly be either JPEG or TIFF formats. You can forget the TIFF format, because those uncompressed images are HUGE. You will probably have at least two choices with JPEG, either minimally compressed or moderately compressed. With the moderately compressed image, some artefacts are introduced, but they aren't likely to be noticed for most purposes. These images are recorded onto the smartmedia card. There is a floppy adapter that can be used to download the images to your imaging program, but this is slow, almost as slow as the serial port method. I would opt for either a parallel port or USB port reader. Lexar makes a Universal reader for $49.99, and it is available for either USB or parallel ports. If you have a USB connection I would use that.

-- Lee Custer (phoebe@laguna.com.mx), May 04, 2000.