21 Apr
2004
21 Apr
'04
2:27 p.m.
On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 11:44:23PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
Anyway, in that case I'll not post about my
digitial camera when I get
round to restoring it. Even though it's about 20 years old, monochrome,
has a linear CCD that's tracked mechanically across the image, and came
with a PERQ interface card. It's clearly got nothing to do with classic
computers...
Until I bought my nice digital SLR last year, my digital camera was an
on-topic model - an Apple QuickTake 150... AFAIK, it came out in 1994.
It's typical Apple - virtually no control over image quality - the only
setting you can affect is bad compression vs worse compression (i.e.,
always 640x480, but either 16 pictures or 32 pictures in its fixed 1MB
of FlashROM). Many of the pictures on my webpage were taken with one
I borrowed from the lab in 1995/1996. I think I took between 500 and
1000 pix in one year with one (enough to almost fill a CD-R, saved in
both its native "QuickTime compressed PICT", and a more ordinary JPG).
My one real beef with it (besides lots of compression artifacts and
its fixed-focus lens) is that the only way I was able to read the
pictures was to find a copy of the Apple install disks via a Mac
friend - Apple apparently included some 3rd-party software on the
disks that prevents them from making the disks available for free
download from Apple's support website. You can't even view the
pictures in their native format unless you've loaded the camera software;
they are PICTs, but the data segment of the PICT file is compressed
in a non-standard way, meaning that even Linux tools that know what
a PICT is can only describe the contents of the picture file from a
structural standpoint. Makes automating certain operations impossible.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Apr-2004 23:10 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -80.2 F (-62.4 C) Windchill -98.59 F (-72.59 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 5.4 kts Grid 074 Barometer 687.1 mb (10361. ft)
Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html