Direct USB connectionHaving recently acquired a digital camera, I have been plowing my way through the minefield of digital camera connectivity with non PC/Mac systems, the Amiga in this case. There are quite a few ways to do it, some cheap, some expensive. Most cameras can be made to work one way or another.
I'm not going to add any non-Amiga specific camera info on this page, for reviews try sites like Digital Photography Review, The Imaging Resource or Steve's DigiCams. If you have anything to say about this page, please feel free to contact me.
For data transfer, most vendors nowadays stick to computer standards (directly or indirectly). The digital camera market is starting to standardize and practically all current models have one or more methods for transferring the information:
Direct USB connectionHaving a USB connection itself does not mean it'll work out of the box on your Amiga. Two things are important here:
E3B has several USB cards called Algor, Highway and Subway. The Pegasos and the AmigaOne also have USB on the motherboard.
So if a camera has a USB port, it may still require proprietary software that only runs on Macs and PCs. The magic word here is MSD, which is short for Mass Storage Device. MSD is a protocol that a USB device can adhere to and that is supported by most USB solutions without requiring additional software. For the Amiga, Poseidon is 'the' USB stack, which does support MSDs among other things.
There is also a Still Image Capture Device standard specifically for USB cameras, which may be used more frequently in the future. If a driver for this kind of device will be written, I'll add it here, as this may open up more options.
You may also find the entire USB Developer Docs page also very interesting, but it is getting a little out of scope for this camera-related page.
If a camera is a USB MSD it will usually not be mentioned directly in your camera's manual. Instead, it will explain that you can connect your camera to a PC or Mac and the camera will automatically be recognized as a removable device, without having to install extra software (this of course assumes you have the USB driver installed). on using DigiCams with linux you can find a small list of USB MSD cameras.
Using USB the data transfer rate will probably be the same as the 'in-camera' transfer rate, which is usually around 350kB/sec. You may also want to check out the VHI Studio software, which is being expanded to support a number of USB cameras which are not MSDs.
Serial connectionA number of Olympus Camedia digital cameras as well as some other cameras use a 'plain old' serial connection instead of USB, which can be used on the Amiga provided you have the right software. On the H&P site you can find AmiCamedia, at Vesalia you can find CamControl, on Aminet you can find Camedia, DigiCam and at IOSpirit you can find VHI Studio. I'm not going to list which cameras are supported by these programs, just check their product pages or Aminet descriptions to see an up-to-date list.
CD-R and CD-RWA few cameras in the Sony Mavica CD range (current models are the CD200, CD250, CD300 and CD400, ranging from 2 to 4 Mpix, the older CD1000 only accepts CD-Rs) do not use any type of memory card, but will read from and write to 8cm CD-Rs and CD-RWs, providing 156MB of storage at a price that no memory card is ever likely to even get close to.
Sony provides PC software with the cameras that can read CDs that are not 'finalized' yet (the 'finalization' basically puts an end marker on a CD-R(W), so no more data can be written to that session). For the Amiga this means you'll have to finalize your CDs in the camera before getting the CD out. No big deal for CD-RWs, but bad news for the cheaper CD-Rs. The finalization process also takes up roughly 12MB of space each time you do it, so you'll want to do it as few times as possible per CD. This effectively limits the amount of times you can add pictures on one CD and read them into your Amiga.
The camera's memory cardGet the memory card out of your camera, stick it in a card reader (this may require an adapter) and get the data from it that way. The cards practically always use MS-DOS format (CompactFlash and SmartMedia do, I have not been able to check MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital card or Memory Stick). Card readers are available with several flavours of interface at the card end and the computer end. First, the computer end:
Guess what, this requires USB again. If you have USB and your camera is not a USB MSD (see above), this will be an easy solution. USB card readers do generally not require any external power source and are usually slim devices, being only slightly bigger than the card itself. USB card readers are fairly cheap and are available in most decent computer and photographics stores.
For those who want SCSI instead of USB, SCSI card readers exist. Definitely not mainstream devices ('everybody else' has USB), you won't find these devices in your average shops. SCSI always carries a bigger price tag, with prices at most shops starting around 350 euros. These pricey toys will get you a claimed transfer rate of 3MB/sec, which sounds nice but is dependant on the medium you want to read/write - expect a few 100Kb per second, easily covered by USB 1.1.
Sporting a data transfer rate similar to or exceeding SCSI (depending on your controller), IDE card readers are a very fast and cheap alternative, making this a cheap USB alternative. Because PCMCIA (and CompactFlash) are very similar to IDE, these readers are very simple to make and therefore quite cheap. IDE card readers usually exist for PCMCIA and CompactFlash, for other formats you may have to combine the PCMCIA reader with an adapter. Note that there are two flavours of IDE card reader, those that support 'hot-swapping' and those that don't. The ones that do support this cost a bit more, but are probably what you need, since you're not only using the memory card as a fixed disk.
USB card readers are easy to find, most computer shops and photo shops have them lying around. IDE and SCSI versions are harder to find, and not all IDE versions seem to work. I have obtained the Microtech SCSI PC Card reader, which is expensive and requires knowledge on creating AmigaOS device files and interrogating the devices to get the proper info for the device files. I spent the money on it because I didn't want to buy a USB driver at the time. The joke's on me now, because I did buy an Algor USB card recently.
Note that not all of the IDE card readers work: The Microtech SCSI card readers work, and I've been mailed that the cheap IDE CF readers work. I have also tried a 'model IIA' IDE card reader from PSISM.com, and can not get it to work on my A4000T's IDE controller. The reader works fine in a PC, but my Amiga won't even start up with that device connected. I don't know if it's the reader or my Amiga, but I suspect the reader does PIO mode 4 only and does not downgrade on a slower controller (might work in an AmigaOne).
Yes, the PCMCIA slot in your humble A600 or A1200 can be used as a card reader. This will require a bit of software, since Commodore did not provide a full implementation of the PCMCIA driver. The answer here is compactflash.device, created by Torsten Jager. This package consists of a device driver and a mountlist. When combined with Torsten's fat95 file system, it will provide a nice removable device for your memory cards. Do not use the AmigaOS CrossDOSFileSystem, as it may screw up your cards or the images on it (your mileage may vary, but it killed one of my cards). As for the mountlist, use the one provided with Torsten's package, it can handle different-sized cards:
NOTE: I do not know if this works on an A1200, since I have only received emails from people that their A1200 doesn't do it. Torsten claims his driver works for A600 and A1200, I have only been able to test it on an old and flaky standard A600. If you have it working in your A1200, please let me know.
There are also floppy card adapters, firewire card readers and parallel card readers. Since these are either not available on the Amiga or not known to work by me, they are mentioned here as 'other formats'. If anybody knows of getting these devices to work on the Amiga, let me know and I'll add it here.
And now for the final aspect of the card readers, the interface at the card end. Most readers exist in specific forms for each type of card, be it CompactFlash, MemoryStick, SmartMedia, Secure Digital Card, MultiMediaCard or whatever. However, right now all these different flavours are fighting it out to become the customer's card format of choice. Effective differences between the different formats are storage capacity (CompactFlash currently has the most) and price (Memory Stick being relatively expensive).
This leads me to the one card format I didn't mention in that list: PCMCIA. Being the oldest format, all but the oldest laptops will have a PCMCIA slot. USB readers and SCSI readers are also available in PCMCIA format and since all newer formats are physically smaller than PCMCIA, PCMCIA adapters exist for all current flavours of memory card. When getting a card reader, I recommend getting a PCMCIA card reader and buying the PCMCIA adapter for your type of memory card. That way you can also read your friend's different format cards (if either of you have an adapter for it, of course) and if you buy a new camera that uses another format, you only need to buy another adapter.
Pricing of these PCMCIA adapters vary: CompactFlash cards are quite literally small versions of PCMCIA cards, so the CompactFlash adapter is a passive and therefore cheap adapter, usually costing 10 or 20 euros. Other memory cards may require active adapters because protocol conversion is required. These cards easily go up to 40 or 50 euros.
SoftwareAnd finally, when using an Amiga you can of course not run the supplied Mac or PC software that comes with most cameras. You may be able to do it with Mac and PC emulators like iFusion or Bloch, but 'doing it native' is of course what you're looking for. Remember those inkjet printers that HP sold? They had a 'normal' version and a 'PostScript' version. Isn't that great for an inkjet? Yes, it would be if the actual printer did it. What they basically did was add GhostScript software and sell the software/printer package as a PostScript inkjet printing solution. So if some features sound too smart for a camera (like image stitching), their functionality may well be in the added PC/Mac software.
A special word of warning here for some of the Minolta Dimage series cameras: the Dimage 5, 7, 7i and S404. These cameras internally work in their own colour space, requiring the 'Minolta Image Viewer Utility' to convert them into the colour space you want, most likely sRGB. The Minolta camera colour space has a wider range than sRGB, which is useful if you want to have the option to convert to different colour spaces, but requires the Minolta software. It also adds a practically mandatory and not insignificant step to your workflow. The fact that the Minolta colour space is bigger means that when you're viewing the image assuming sRGB as colour space, colours will look a little bland and less vivid. Check the camera review sites mentioned at the top to see the 'before and after' shots, the difference is significant.
I have tried to convert a calibration image back to Minolta colour space and then run it through Wolf Faust's ICS software to get an Amiga profile for it, but the Minolta utility is careful not to accept any images that are not straight out of the camera. Basically, it does not accept images saved with any other program than the camera itself (Photoshop included), so I have not been able to create a colour profile for it on the Amiga.