More than a tweak.

September 16, 2004 3:22 AM

Music & photography. How to soup up that digital camera.(via coolios)
posted by johnny7 (13 comments total)

Seems /. had this up so apologies if it's old news.
posted by johnny7 at 3:41 AM on September 16, 2004

Still cool to me. I don't read /.
posted by crazy finger at 5:51 AM on September 16, 2004

I don't either and after using a 256MB CompactFlash card for a recent trip, I'd been shopping for a larger capacity CF card so I wouldn't have to be connecting to my iBook as often... US$250 for 5GBs is an incredible price, considering a **1GB** CF card costs that much. I may let my Inner Geek have a go at reproducing this...
posted by JollyWanker at 8:03 AM on September 16, 2004

In some cameras a microdrive can be much slower than the solid state CF card,
you may want to try one out before trashing the MP3 player.
posted by milovoo at 8:33 AM on September 16, 2004

People were doing the same thing with the 4gb Creative Muvo2 several months ago - but as soon as it became widely-known, Hitachi modified the drives it was giving Creative so they no longer worked in cameras.

(The cheapest high-capacity mobile solution is still a couple of 256mb (or 512mb) cards and an 'image tank' style portable hard drive with a memory card slot, of which many are now available.)
posted by cell at 8:42 AM on September 16, 2004

I second cell's image tank idea. I did that for a trip to Europe and it worked great. I actually just bought the image tank case and took the 30gb hard drive out of my laptop that I wasn't bringing and used it. Worked like a charm and I only had to spend about 60 bucks for the case (if I remember right).
posted by josephtate at 9:04 AM on September 16, 2004

[sigh] I just don't understand this.

You can buy 2 gig SanDisk Ultra ]['s for $163.00 at Dell, for chrissake (that's the top-top of the line CF card for high-buffer cameras that can support it, like the Nikon D70).

Why risk trashing a $250 MP3 player for a storage card that's going to cost you half as much in a couple of months? Not to mention, it's not even CF -- it's a microdrive (slooooooow). Hell, you can get 4 gigs of actual CF from NewEgg for the same price.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:43 AM on September 16, 2004

Also, as some people were mentioning the Image "Tank" solution, I'd like to second this idea with a caveat. The nice thing about portable backup solutions is that:

• You are no long tethered to a laptop
• You can store a shitload of images
• You only have to buy two memory cards (1 to shoot with while the other is backing up)

The critical thing with these portable solutions is to get a system with the fastest image "dump" capability. Some older models take 5-10 minutes to dump all the CF data; not a problem if you've got two big cards to swap between, but 5-10 minutes is an eternity if you're at a once-in-a-lifetime place with only 1 card.

With that said, I highly recommend this little beastie -- and check out this chart to compare CF write times.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:51 AM on September 16, 2004

People were doing the same thing with the 4gb Creative Muvo2 several months ago - but as soon as it became widely-known, Hitachi modified the drives it was giving Creative so they no longer worked in cameras.

Why? Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone involved.

My apologies for what may be a question which has obvious answer: Why did the camera's LCD display even have a "K" in it? Not only would the display not need that functionality (because with a 5gig drive it's only 1.4k), but it would need to be added to whatever algorithm counts the remaining space.
posted by hoborg at 10:52 AM on September 16, 2004

I guess they stopped it because Hitachi (I think it was them) themselves sell/sold the same drive retail for significantly more money than they sell/sold it to creative.

I guess the 'K' doesn't make sense now, but what about in a couple of years when we might have 10-15gig microdrives?

(Although anything over a thousand could just display "lots!" I suppose)
posted by cell at 11:23 AM on September 16, 2004

Why did the camera's LCD display even have a "K" in it? Not only would the display not need that functionality
(because with a 5gig drive it's only 1.4k)

He did mention that this was at the highest resolution, it's likely that shooting in the lowest res mode you could have thousands of images on even a fairly small storage device.
posted by milovoo at 12:07 PM on September 16, 2004

He did mention that this was at the highest resolution, it's likely that shooting in the lowest res mode you could have thousands of images on even a fairly small storage device.

milovoo - I've used this camera, and that is exactly right.
posted by blade at 1:18 PM on September 16, 2004

Of course! Duh... Thanks milovoo. [sheepish]
posted by hoborg at 8:35 AM on September 17, 2004