As I am getting ready to take a vacation at the end of the month and wireless Internet access has becomes fairly ubiquitous, emailing pictures from your digital camera should be getting easier. I finally have gotten the whole family to understand and use the Kodak EasyShare gallery. Everyone knows how to upload and share their pictures. Using Adobe Photo Elements, the task is mindless, although in 6.0 the function is buried in other sharing options. Adobe wants you to use their service, but give them credit they kept the Kodak Gallery function. On vacation however I don't want to lug my laptop, I want to be able to transfer pictures from my camera to my PDA, email them to Kodak ([email protected]), and share them via their paying mobile web site which I only subscribe when I need it ($2.99 / month). I detailed my approach to making this work back in 2006 (link).
In some way the process had gotten easier with cameras which provide WIFI functionality, however it looks like Nikon, Sony and Kodak are letting those models die on the vine. They must have been a bust. I was never attracted to them because I felt they offered too little on the camera end and the price was too steep.
The other choice is to use an Eye-Fi SD card which provides WIFI capability as well as storage. This is actually a very nice option if you have a camera that accepts SD cards, unfortunately my Sony cameras don't.
It looks like my option remains the process I developed in 2006. I would love to use my new HD camcorder which also takes 6.1MP stills (Sony HDRCX7). It is a very compact and lightweight flash based camcorder with a 10X optical zoom. I originally bought it for video reviews, but found that the 6.1MP still picture quality was excellent and having the 10x zoom provided great flexibility. Unfortunately, Sony left out all of the still photo editing/sizing features I have in the DSC-W70 and the USB interface is not recognized by the Delkin USB Bridge. The second upgrade I wanted to make to my process was to use my iPhone to email the pictures to Kodak. The Delkin USB Bridge won't recognize the iPhone either. I have an iPod Camera adapter which works great with my 5th generation iPod, however it looks like Apple has stopped supporting this accessory. The new iPods, Touch, and iPhone all pop up an unsupported accessory message. This is really too bad because it is a valuable backup tool for your camera on trips.
So here I am in 2008 with new gadgets which I cannot use the way I want unless I bring my laptop. I guess people wait until they return from vacation to share their pictures or use the lousy cameras in their phones to email while on their trips. I don't want to bring my laptop, maybe I need to look at UMPCs but they are all so expensive. Tabletkiosk has a new one, the eo UMPC v7110e which looks very attractive. Maybe I will get a chance to review it before deciding to pluck down the hefty $1000 entry price. Or better yet try out the Eye-Fi SD card which more in my budget range...
I may just use my Sony DSC-W70 and my AT&T Tilt, I know that combination works and the cheapest solution.
Nothing seems simple these days or is it just me...
It really is interesting to consider the nagging problems that the internet has never managed to solve despite it's ubiquity and capacity.
You touch on a whole category of problems relating to transferring and storing files. It's amazing to see people emailing small files to themselves and emailing them to friends with whom they are in interactive communication over high speed links. Or worse: skipping the internet all together and using removable storage despite both computers' connections to the net.
It's obviously the wrong tool for the job most of the time, but then there isn't any widely-used better alternative.
Why this failure? In this day and age of near-ubiquitous and fairly fast internet access and dirt cheep storage, why isn't there a good way to send documents back and forth or easily store them temporarily?
Your cameras fall into this hole: they simply need to upload a picture to the internet... but look how much of a hassle this simple operation ends up being.
There's a systemic failure in there somewhere...
Posted by: Chris Carlin | April 16, 2008 at 05:04 PM
Chris, I could not agree more. I am currently working with a company to help them collaboratively use files on a document server without emailing them to each other. The project is more about modifying the ingrained culture than the technology.
Posted by: Stephen Skarlatos | April 16, 2008 at 09:30 PM