kerravonsen | Mar. 14th, 2004

I now have a new digital camera! I bought it yesterday, and charged it last night, and figured out how to use it this afternoon, including how to download the photos to my laptop. It is an Olympus mju:300 which I basically got because I have no sales resistance; the man said he used the next one up (the 400) and liked it, and after I asked a lot of questions about USB and Compact Flash (this one doesn't use Compact Flash it uses its own brand of memory card, but there's a USB connection straight from the camera), I decided to go with his reccommendation, spending about twice as much as I'd intended. But it does seem to be nice and easy to use, and actually has a zoom lens, which is useful. I haven't tried the "macro" mode yet. I had a moment of panic when I wondered if I'd ended up with one of those cameras which can only use MS-Windows software, but to my relief, it is one of the modern cameras which has gone with the USB "Mass Storage" standard. Which means it's a matter of plugging it in, looking at the console to see the message, making a /mnt/camera directory, and adding one line to /etc/fstab. And then when you plug it in, it's just "mount /mnt/camera" and then you can read and write it like a disk. Easy!

I have added a "photos" section to Kat's Eye Gallery if you wanna see what random photos someone might take with a new camera... I reduced them in size from the actual pictures because I figured that pictures taking up more than the size of the screen aren't very viewable.