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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news
this week 09/30/2009 Your digital camera
is part of your computer now, so we can talk about it …. Part 2 My
digital camera is 3 years old now, but still works great for me. It’s a Samsung
I6 PMP digital camera and the PMP means it’s not just a camera –
it’s a Personal Media Player too! It’s
a 6 megapixel camera, a movie camera, an mp3 player, and a sound recorder. Initially
I did put some mp3 files on it, and listened to them on an airplane once, but
I’ve never used that feature since. I’ve never used the sound
recorder feature either, as I found out that if I was going to record sound, I might as well record video too at the same time. Like
many digital cameras you can buy today, the default picture type is .jpg
which is fine, and the default movie file type is .avi, which is fine too
for working with moviemaker. It has a USB cable to connect to my computer,
and it shows up in windows as just another storage device. As I mentioned
last week you can also use your camera as a flash drive to store data on. Although
it came with its own software to do many functions, I just copy the pictures
from it to my computer and then use other programs I prefer to use to catalog
and manage them. When
you get your first digital camera, there’s a
few things you might want to do. I
upgraded the memory when I first got it. It had a 512Mb chip in it, but I
bought a 2 Gb chip at the time in 2006 which sold for about $ 75. The other day I was standing in line to check
out of Fred Meyers and next to the candy bars they had camera accessories,
and a 2 Gb chip today sells for $ 9.99. Upgrading
the memory might be something for you to do, particularly if you plan on
taking a lot of movies. I carry the
original 512 Meg chip in my camera bag as a spare, but I’ve never come
anywhere close to needing it. You
see, with the 2 Gb memory chip and my default picture size set down to 1
megapixel – which is more than enough for anything you plan on putting
on the internet, I can take almost 8,000 pictures !!!
I’ve developed the habit of snapping 2 or 3 pictures of anything I
shoot, having the luxury of so much memory. Even
if I hadn’t set the default picture size down, I could still take 1,690
pictures at the original 6 megapixel size. Usually when I go on a trip and
take a lot of pictures over several days, I still only take about 600 pictures.
The biggest mistake
most new digital camera owners make, which makes them internet road hogs, is
not setting the default size of their pictures down from the 8 megabytes size or
whatever - down to a usable 1 meg
size, and I’ll tell you how to correct this problem next week. |
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For Raw
Bytes This is
Frank Delaney (C) 2009
MTA Micro Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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