From Mandriva Community Wiki

Cameras can appear as hard drives, or can be accessed with the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). In trying to access my Sony F-707 camera, I found that the hard drive method was unreliable... on the surface, it appears that one can't mix memory sizes. I initially connected the camera with a 64MB memory stick and found that the 32MB and 128MB sticks were not accessible. Later, I tried gtkam (gphoto2) using PTP and this seemed to work more reliably; though gtkam could stand to be a tad more intuitive.

Note: xD storage cards are a format jointly developed by FujiFilm and Olympus. xD cameras were not supported in 2.4 kernels before 2.4.21

Contents 1 Canon Powershot 1.1 A80 2 FujiFilm FinePix 2.1 FujiFilm FinePix S304 2.2 FujiFilm FinePix1300 2.2.1 FujiFilm FinePix S5500 3 Kodak 3.1 Kodak DX6340 USB 4 BenQ 4.1 DC-2410 5 Olympus 5.1 Olympus C 740 Ultra Zoom 5.2 Olympus C1000 5.3 Olympus C60 6 Sony 6.1 Sony DSC-W1/W12 6.2 Sony DSC-P200 7 Useful Links 8 Digital Camera Review Sites 9 Camera Quality

Canon Powershot

A80

• Works on 10.0 with gphoto2 (gphoto2 2.1.4, libgphoto2 2.1.4, libgphoto2_port 0.5.1). I use these commands:
  • Get all:

    gphoto2 -P or gphoto2 --port=usb: --camera "Canon PowerShot A80 (normal mode)" -P

  • List all:

    gphoto2 --port=usb: --camera "Canon PowerShot A80 (normal mode)" -L

  • Delete all:

    gphoto2 -D -R or gphoto2 --port=usb: --camera "Canon PowerShot A80 (normal mode)" -D -R

  • Capture image:

    gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A80 (PTP)" --port=usb: --capture-image

• Some trouble on 10.2
  • Deleting all takes a long time
  • Listing usually doesn't work. The error messages have been experienced by others (google), but I haven't taken the time to figure them out yet.

FujiFilm FinePix

FujiFilm FinePix S304

• An xD card camera, requires kernel 2.4.21 or later, but works well. With 2005LE download edition the mounting gave a desktop icon, making access easy. Updating to the Club edition, with kernel kernel-2.6.11.6 broke that, and I could no longer access the camera. Updates to hal and udev were required, plus a change to kernel-2.6.11.12. All works well again.

FujiFilm FinePix1300

• Requires recent 2.4.x kernel. This camera uses USB-mass storage. Mount as a SCSI hard disk (sda1, for example) with a vfat filesystem. Easiest setup is to reboot with camera connected/on and let harddrake detect it. Once mounted, files will be in /dcim/100_fuji.

FujiFilm FinePix S5500

• An xD card camera, works with kernel 2.6.8 and probably others. Supports mass storage, so an icon will pop up on your desktop when you connect the usb cable.

Kodak

Kodak DX6340 USB

• The DX6340 works flawlessly with Mandriva 9.1 and gphoto/gphoto2. It is detected as a "USB PTP Class Camera". PTP stands for Picture Transfer Protocol and is a standard that is followed by many cameras in the market currently. It works so well, as a matter of fact, that it works BETTER and more RELIABLY than on my Win2K box at work. The only catch that I hit at first was a permissions problem. gphoto2 reads and writes /proc/bus/usb/* directly, so the user needs to be a part of group "usb" in order for the gphoto/gphoto2 drivers to control the camera. Once in the group, it worked with no further tweaking required.

BenQ

DC-2410

• This camera uses USB-mass storage (SCSI over USB). Requires a recent 2.4.x kernel. Mounts as a SCSI hard disk.

Olympus

Olympus C 740 Ultra Zoom

• Works excellent in 9.1 and 9.2. It uses a xD memory card as a mass-storage device. I just plug the camera into an USB port, and if supermount is active a mount/camera icon will pop up - at least in KDE. Clicking this icon will open the xD card in a file manager, ready to use. Of course, if supermount is absent, one can mount the card manually.

Olympus C1000

• Downloads only by serial link. Works well with gphoto.

Olympus C60

• Works fine with 10.1. Mounts and looks like a drive. Konqueror gives additional info about each picture. Uses xD cards.

Sony

Sony DSC-W1/W12

• Using LE2005 - Digikam recognises it as DSC-F707V in PTP mode. I turn it on, plug it in, and open digikam, and it works fine. ACPI had to be enabled in MCC "boot options" for USB devices to be recognised.

Sony DSC-P200

• Uses Memory Stick Pro as USB mass storage. On Mandriva 2006.0 Official it is detected and mounted has a SCSI drive (/dev/sdaN).

Useful Links

• http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html - database of digital camera support

Digital Camera Review Sites

• http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/ -- Great site; awesome detail in reviews

Camera Quality

It would be nice to have a standardized test for background image noise generated by a camera; but alas... so here's some image fragments from different cameras showing the [lack of] noise in various cameras.