Some time ago I visited Douglas’ Bowmans new photo section and as always he did a good job, representing his photos in a nice environment. Reading his blog post on the new gallery and seeing his photos I was remembered of an unfulfilled wish. My problem with cameras always was, that I did not want to take them with me. Most of those I used so far are simply to heavy and you do not feel very comfortable, when you need to carry them around for a long time. On holiday or when I saw something interesting, I had to realize way to often that I left my camera at home for personal convenience.
The idea to buy a small camera first popped up around last year. I needed to go abroad for about a month. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to order a camera in time for my departure over here and so my wish was unfulfilled at that time.
I looked into Doug’s camera now and I thought his camera is the one I wanted to have. The pictures are impressing (O.K., I admit it, he understands to pick good motives) and the reviews I read on the net are mostly positive. There’s even a guide on how to adjust the settings to archive best pictures. The price is O.K. for me, too.
And so I did it. Ich machte Nägel mit Köpfen, as we say in Germany. I ordered a Canon Digital Ixus 40 Thursday night and it just arrived this morning. I already played around with it a bit and I like it very much. It is not much bigger than any proprietary credit card.
Linux Support
As I figured out, Linux support for the Canon Digital Ixus 40 is very good. Unfortunately I failed in getting my SD-Card reader to work with a custom 2.6.8 kernel and so I had to connect the camera via the white (and therefore “Mac-style”) USB cable supplied by the manufacturer to download my photos. Unfortunately, the camera does not have native USB storage support and therefore can’t be mounted directly, but a library called gphoto2 and it’s gui frontend application gtkam detected the camera in no time. Using gtkam handling everything is even more comfortable. I can use the application to browse all pictures without downloading them and only safe the ones I want to keep to my harddisk. The rest can be deleted right away. For those people, who like a more technically oriented approach, I can tell you that the program and my camera communicate using a protocol called PTR. Whatever that is – it works!
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