Christmas Camfoolery
Christmas brought a couple new camera gadgets into the Geekfoolery household. We’ve just returned from a 2400-mile road trip where we’ve put these devices through their paces. Here now a quick review:
Eye-Fi: The Eye-Fi card appears to be a standard-issue 2GB SD memory card, but the secret is the built-in WiFi transmitter. The Eye-Fi’s gadget magic trick is automatically downloading pictures you take with your digital camera to your computer, either as you take them, if you are in range, or when you return home. It works on PC and Mac, and the software you need to install on your machine comes pre-loaded on the card itself, which ships with it’s own USB SD card reader.
Additionally, you can set up your Eye-Fi to automatically upload pictures directly to online album sites like Flickr, Picasa, and most of the popular album sites.
There are two flaws in the Eye-Fi for Mrs. Geekfoolery, on whose camera the Eye-Fi is used. The problem was that we were always finding ourselves out somewhere with the memory card in the camera full, because sitting down and finding the cable or the SD card reader and offloading pics from the camera to be one of those tasks that one is always meaning to do, but never does. The Eye-Fi was supposed to be the cure-all for this… put it in the camera, never take it out again, and all you have to do have the computer and camera on at the same time to clear out the next batch.
And the Eye-Fi does this just fine–but only for pictures. Our digital camera, like most these days, also takes movie clips, and this is one of our favorite uses of the camera. To download the movie clips, you have to remove the Eye-Fi card and connect it to a USB port, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid.
The second issue is that while Eye-Fi can send pictures to online websites just fine, what it can’t seem to do is load pictures directly into iPhoto on our Mac. It downloads to a well-organized folder on the hard drive, and it is fairly simple to import them into iPhoto, but the reason for the Eye-Fi to exist is to remove ALL the intermediate steps in getting pictures off our camera.
Eye-Fi’s email support team indicates that these features are not currently supported, so it seems that it’s just a matter of software to fix them, but it’s not clear when Eye-Fi will update these issues, if at all.
The second photo gadget to arrive on Christmas was actually a camera. Specifically which camera it was is actually unimportant–it was chosen based on the following criteria: We wanted a recognizable name brand and the lowest price possible. We ended up with an Olympus from Frye’s for around $100. This gift was for the 12-year-old geekling in the house who has been bugging us for a camera of her own for some time, and she’s been enjoying it immensely. The point is not to review the pros and cons of this particular camera. It’s simply to acknowledge that we’ve gotten to the point were digital cameras are now commodity-priced. You don’t really need to agonize excessively over which camera to buy these days. If you go with a reasonably well-known brand and buy from a fairly reputable outlet, you’re going to pretty decent camera. If you are a total shutterbug with money to burn, there are plenty of much higher-quality cameras and specialized features to learn and compare, but for the vast majority of the snapshot taking public who just want a better camera than the one on their cellphone, it’s hard to go wrong.
The final camera that is coming into the Geekfoolery Manor this holiday season is a classic camera with a long pedigree. I’m old enough to have owned this camera once before, many years ago, as a hand-me-down from I forget who. If you’re old enough, you might have owned one as well, or certainly your parents did. It’s the Kodak Brownie.
We we were hiking in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, when I saw a man hiking the opposite direction carrying the unmistakable brown Bakelite camera I recalled from my youth. I turned and asked, “Is that–a Brownie?” Indeed it was, and he was off to take pictures of the beautiful scenery of the sandstone arches onto glorious medium-format film. I had heard some time ago that Kodak had discontinued making film for the Brownie, which comes on rolls that you thread onto a spool and wind up inside the camera. No cartridges or sealed 35mm cannisters. The owner of the Brownie Hawkeye we spotted told us that it was in fact true, but with a little ingenuity, the old Brownies could be made to use modern 120 film without too much trouble. We were advised to seek one out on ebay, and we bought a Hawkeye yesterday for five bucks (nine bucks shipping). We’re looking forward to fiddling with the film and running our first roll through it. No 4GB SD cards that will take 2000 pictures at high resolution, though–just 12 exposures, and we’ll have to take it to a real camera store to get it processed. In the meantime, here are a couple galleries of modern Brownie pics that we can use for inspiration.
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