30 May
2007
30 May
'07
11:10 a.m.
On 5/30/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
My oldest is not quite there--a Mustek VDC-300 from
1998. 640x480,
but can take a CF card... Miserable photo quality, but simple to use-
-and it doubles as a videocam with NTSC output.
Okay, so what does one do with these relics? One can
reuse old PCs
to do various things, but what's an old digicam good for?
In the case of my QuickTake 150, not much. One can show it off at a
VCF, but in a practical sense, it's not particularly useful unless you
are a masochist. In your case, NTSC hasn't changed much in 10 years
;-) so you could still use yours for a security camera or a webcam or
whatever.
I used a ~10-year-old Olympus recently for my EarthDial... I picked it
specifically because it was a classic device with an RS-232 port,
*not* USB. I whipped up a perl script to call gphoto to snap the
shot, dump the picture, clear the picture, then chew on the image a
bit (crop and label) and push it back home via scp. I don't know if
it's easy to tell a "modern" camera to take a photo via USB, but all
the ones I know of just treat the camera as an external storage
device, not a scanner-like peripheral to be controlled.
This is a clear case where the older equipment can do stuff the newer
equipment cannot (but the vast majority of the unwashed masses don't
_want_ to take a still image under computer control, so the feature
vanished).
-ethan
P.S. - this was the rig where I watched an 8MB SmartMedia card
demonstrate wear levelling during a loss of about 5% of its original
capacity over a period of months.