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From: fontenot@rice.edu (Dwayne Jacques Fontenot)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics,rec.photo
Subject: Re: Digital Photography
Message-ID: <1991Mar27.015600.21812@rice.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 91 01:56:00 GMT
References: <1991Mar22.234502.4783@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <50815@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
Reply-To: fontenot@comet.rice.edu (Dwayne Jacques Fontenot)
Organization: Rice University, Houston, Texas
Lines: 42

In article <50815@apple.Apple.COM> twakeman@Apple.COM (Teriann J. Wakeman) writes:
>In article <1991Mar22.234502.4783@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Phil Howard KA9WGN) writes:
>>I would like to find out what the current state of the market is (I know
>>for certain the technology exists) for ways to do digital photography.
>>
>>1.  Do any of these digital video still cameras have a direct digital to
>>    digital interface so that you can load the photos you took directly
>>    into the computer WITHOUT a video step along the way?
>Yes, there as a few didital cameras on the market.  Canon makes a couple. They
>image to a small floppy disk.  You insert the disk into a reader that is
>connected to a Macintosh as a SCSI peripherial & save it onto a hard drive.
>Then you can open the picture into a photographic editing package such as
>Adobe Photoshop, Digital DarkRoom or Image Studio. You can edit your picture
>if you wish, print it  or place a copy into a desktop pubishing application.
>>

The image data is stored internally (on the 2" floppy) in an *analog* format
that was developed ~10 years ago by a consortium of electronics corporations.
After the image is taken off the CCD, it is no longer digital -- if you want
it in digital form, you have to *digitize* it. The analog step involves
quite a bit of degradation of the image data. I think the first poster and
I are looking for the same thing; a digital camera that stores the images
in DIGITAL form on the internal floppy, and, (this is the important part)
has an RS232 port on it. That way, you could hook up you DB25 strap cable
directly from the camera to your computer's serial port -- no expensive,
quality-degrading peripherals required. I cannot afford $700 for the
camera *plus* $xK for a (useless for anything else) disk drive or a frame
grabber card. Also, I refuse on principle alone to buy anything so stupidly
obviously built-in-planned-obsolescence designed (i.e. there is *NO* reason,
at least no good reason I have heard, for these cameras to still be using
ugly, messy analog technology). So what if I can only get half the current
number of images on a disk, I would gladly make that tradeoff. Or, more likely,
I would pay more for higher density disks, since they are reuseable.

Well, I really didn't mean to get on a soap box about this; just inform you
that the current "digital" cameras out on the market (at least all the ones
I have seen and read about) are still really analog where it counts.

Thank you for your time,

Dwayne Fontenot (fontenot@comet.rice.edu)
Rice Advanced Visualization Lab (RAVL)