I shoot a lot of staged shots so the number of clicks is always like 5 or less.
On my home machine, I have Ubuntu Linux 8.04LTS which recognizes my camera and lets me copy paste RAW images without any fuss what so ever. No driver no proprietary software. Just the default F-spot image manager works like a charm.
So when number of shots were less and Ubuntu recognized the camera, I pretty much used to plug my camera in the USB slot and download the images......all was well and life was all nice and happy!!
It was last week when I realized how badly I can get stuck up if I rely on camera-PC communication rather then using a dedicated card reader.
I wanted to transfer a few gigs worth of photos to my dad's computer which has Windows XP and the machine would not recognize my RAW images when plugged in. JPG's were seen and were downloadable, but RAW files were just not displayed.
After doing some research and reading many blogs, I got to know that 1) there are many other people having the same problem, and 2) that XP that I had installed (I have a pretty old system) would not recognize RAW files unless I patch it up and install a RAW viewer from Microsoft site (this is only for folks who have paid for their OS...they do some checking of if you have a legal copy....else don't even try...you never know what unknown code comes with what you expect to be a simple RAW patch!!!!).
So I download the RAW viewer and installed it and still no luck. I tried to download the latest Canon RAW codec and driver from Canon site, got it, installed it and guess what...still no luck.
I finally gave up and started hunting for DPP or Zoom Browser software's on Canon site as I did not have them installed and did not have the CD which came along the camera.
Apparetly, Canon only allows you to download the updates. It expects something installed on your machine. I found that to be totally illilogical business strategy, but anyways, I could not get the software on my machine.
I had to wait for a few days for my friend to get me the CD....I installed the software and then I was able to download RAW files to the computer.
So much of time and energy lost (not to mention the bandwidth used up on downloading all patches and all).
I decided I had enough of this bullshit - I needed a card reader!!
I checked few shops for readers and finally settled for "Tech-Com 36 in 1" card reader which I got for INR. 225/-.
Tested it out and felt why I did not go for it earlier.....
1GB Transfer: Camera - PC: 8-12 Mins (connection broke once or twice in between transfer)
1GB Transfer: Card Reader - PC: 2.56 Mins
No dependency to operating systems anymore - no drain on camera battery - just shove the card in the reader, plug the damn thing in USB and you are all set to download the images.
Camera: Canon 350D
Card: CF II 1GB
Card Reader: Tech-Com 36 in 1 exteral card reader
Camera-PC Test
Operating Systems Tested on: XP, Vista, Ubuntu 8.04LTS
Card-PC Test
Operating Systems Tested on: XP, Ubuntu 8.04LTS
So, take a cue from my lesson and get yourself a card reader. It's cheap, it's small and you will save a lot of headache when using someone else's computer which does not have the needed softwares or while traveling and using a cyber cafe PC to download images which does not have a card reader.
Friday, October 31, 2008
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2 comments:
That's quite strange. I have always used my XP machine to download pics from my camera. Everytime I used to plug the camera into my home computer through the USB cable, the PC used to recognise the camera's SD card as an external storage device. And you can download any kind of file from an external storage device. Never faced this kind of problem. Maybe it's a peculiar problem with Canon...
Now it's even easier for me, since my Thinkpad has an SD card reader.
That's true. Even I never faced any issues before this day.
Here is a link to Microsoft site where they confirm this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D48E808E-B10D-4CE4-A141-5866FD4A3286&displaylang=en
It is an old article and may not apply to newer (patched) versions of XP, but I was dealing with machine which did not have XP SP2.
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