background

After a year of ownership of the Mustek Gsmart Mini I decided to treat myself to a rather more powerful digital camera.

My criteria were something like

Not too expensive
Optical zoom
Had to be supported under Linux

The cost factor pretty much limited me to 2 Megapixel cameras (I didn't want to bother with anything less than that, as I was concerned the quality wouldn't be sufficiently better than the Mustek.)

The short-list I came down to was

Fuji A205S (previously A204)
Kodak CX6230
Nikon 2100

I'd previously looked at the Fuji A204 in the shops and thought (perhaps unjustly) that it felt a bit flimsy. Also, it uses xD cards for storage, which are a bit more expensive than those used by the other two.

It was a close-run thing between the Kodak and the Nikon. The Nikon was about 20 pounds more expensive. However, it uses Compact Flash cards, which at the time were about 10 pounds cheaper for a 128Mb card than the Secure Digital cards used by the Kodak. I figured that in due course I was sure to buy at least 256Mb of storage, so this evened out the cameras on the cost issue.

The Nikon has a lot more shooting modes and options than the Kodak. I felt this would make the Nikon a more interesting camera to use beyond the short-term, as there would be more to experiment with.

The reviews I read showed little if any difference in picture quality between the two.

The Nikon's slowest shutter speed is 4 seconds. I thought there was a chance that I might want to take some long exposures at night sometime. (The Kodak's longest shutter speed is 0.5 seconds.)

I had a look at a few magazine reviews on newsstands also. These all rated both cameras highly, but all gave the edge to the Nikon.

Conversely, one review I read indicated that the Nikon's flash strength was not so good, which could limit its usefulness for indoor shots (particularly large rooms or big parties.)

Also, the movie mode of the Kodak includes mono sound, whereas the Nikon movies are silent.

Another factor was that the Nikon supports USB mass storage mode for extracting the pictures from it, whereas the Kodak forces the use of PTP mode. USB mass storage meant the camera would work right away under Linux, whereas PTP meant fiddling about getting gphoto built. Whilst that should be a no-brainer, my gphoto installation is rather non-standard and fragile because I've got a locally modified version to support my Mustek camera.

So, all in all it was a close call. However, I decided to go with the Nikon.

Linux software support

Since the Nikon 2100 uses USB mass storage, there is no issue with accessing the pictures. Just compile SCSI and USB mass storage support into the kernel, and the camera appears as a scsi drive.

Alternatively, you can pull out the compact flash card and stick it in a USB card reader. When plugged in, this also presents as a scsi drive.

The camera formats the card with a MS-DOS FAT filesystem, so you need support for that compiled in also.

Once the camera's drive is mounted, you can move the pictures off it with standard file system comands (cp, rm etc), or use your favourite file manager.

The still photos are stored in JPEG format, and can be viewed with any suitable software you have (currently I use gqview .

The camera's movies claim to be in Quicktime format (.MOV). This was a risk area when I bought the camera. I couldn't find anything on the WWW about whether this was supported by Linux movie players. However, it turns out the files play just fine in both mplayer and xine. So no worries here.

Overall then, there are no problem areas with software support for this camera under Linux.

good points

To be written.

good or bad points

These are either good or bad points, depending on your perspective.

To be written.

bad points

To be written.

summary

I am more than happy with this camera. It's my first introduction to serious digital photography, in comparison the Mustek Gsmart mini looks like a toy.
To be continued.

example photos

overview

This section contains some photos I've taken with the Nikon Coolpix 2100 in its 1st week of ownership, so you can make your own mind up about its capabilities.

Note, none of the images have been enhanced in any way. They are all straight from the camera, apart from being scaled down from 1600x1200 to 800x600 to make their sizes more web-friendly.