Saturday, October 18, 2008

My new Canon PowerShot SD1100IS

See Edit Below

There will be a lot of gear postings, I'm sure. But for now, this is the only piece of gear we've purchased for the trip. I've been in the market for a digital camera for a while, and after receiving a few Best Buy gift cards for my birthday, I decided it was finally time to get one.

The SD1100IS is an 8 megapixel camera that will take a SD/SDHC card for additional memory. This is important, when you might need to use that same SD card for additional memory on your laptop. It also has a 3x optical zoom, and will happily shoot movies. To be honest, I don't know much about what any of the other specs mean. But the price was right, and with the the battery, a very small battery charger (important) and standard USB cable, it weighs in around 3/4 pound. Light is good.

Not having anything interesting to take a photo of (how I wish I'd had this thing the last two weddings and hiking trip...), I went out back and shot pictures of the squirrels.

I was really worried about how compatible this camera would be with my Linux laptop, which runs Ubuntu. I became double worried when I opened the camera up the first time and saw maybe six warnings that said to install the software before plugging the camera in. I did run the cd on my Windows desktop. As I expected, it was just a bunch of crap programs that Canon wanted me to install on my machine. I opted out of most of them. I was just worried that the cd might pull updated firmware from the Internet and install it on connection or something. It did nothing of the sort.

When I plugged it into my laptop I was immediately greeted with a little Gnome alert box asking me if I wanted to import these photos into my collection. I said yes. Then I spent some quality time on the terminal with the find command looking for photos added in the last few hours. I found nothing. I also noticed there was no drive mounted in /media, but the camera was found via lsusb. So it was on to Google. After a little bit of searching, I found that many cameras work better with Ubuntu if you use them via gThumb. So a quick apt-get install gthumb and I was on my way.

So now everything seems to work perfect, and I've been very pleased so far. Now I just need to read the manual and figure out what all these settings do.

Edit - 22:12 - Some time this afternoon my Windows computer abruptly decided to stop booting, and simply blue screened even when trying to launch into Safe Mode. After using "Last known good configuration" I figured out why - there was a virus lurking on my PC. The only thing I've installed in the last 24 hours was the software that came with this camera. I can't prove anything conclusively, of course, but I'll work on it. After my computers are clean, I'll virtualize a new Windows XP install and see if I can't get the camera software to install the virus again.

| posted at: 12:21 | permanent link and comments

You can view more entries using the archive links to your left or by looking at our index!