Camera Software

16 August 1997

Back to Daruma Festival Photos
Back to DC120 Pages Index

I installed the software that came with the camera onto the Macintosh. I am quite pleased with the Picture Transfer application; I can get the pictures en masse and save them in the very compact .KDC format on my hard disk.

The Photoshop plug-in requires a lot of memory, but works well. I haven't used the "enhance" feature because I have Intellihance, which does a super job of touching up the photos.

After the plug-in has transferred pictures to Photoshop, there seems to be a several-second delay before the Close button responds. Putting the wristwatch icon up here would be a good idea.

Also, the preview window only shows the first seven characters of a file name, so when I used a template like "daruma" and loaded "daruma14" and "daruma15", the preview window showed two pictures named "daruma1". named "daruma1"

Someone in software-land appears to be allocating memory and failing to release it. I am running several applications and am not sure who the guilty party is. I'll let you know when I track it down.

Finally, I come to PhotoEnhancer, which must have been a direct port from a WindowsTM program. During installation it appeared to spray a multitude of files onto my hard disk, including some extensions with the word MicrosoftTM at the beginning.

Since I didn't know what the extensions were, nor how much memory they would use, nor which other extensions they'd conflict with (their names didn't appear meaningful at first glance during installation), I immediately used the "remove" option on the installer to get rid of PhotoEnhancer.

Even though I hadn't restarted the system, and thus not activated those extensions, the installer reported that it couldn't remove all the files it had put there.

This was not a confidence-inspiring event, and I haven't tried reinstalling and using that software.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

When I use my standard camera, a manual Pentax K-1000, my biggest worry is how many shots I have left on my roll of film.

With a 15-MB memory card in the Kodak DC-120 and the ability to erase pictures, my concern has now shifted to "how much life is left in my batteries?"

I bought two sets of Ray-O-Vac Renewal batteries and a charger. The first set of batteries first gave me a "you'd better replace us" warning on the DC120 battery status indicator this afternoon at 1 PM. I plugged them into the charger and left for the festival with the other set of batteries. When I next looked at the charger at 6 PM, the batteries had been recharged. I am greatly pleased with this.

All the DC-120 owners in the digital photo newsgroup have complained that the LCD is exceedingly difficult to see in direct sunlight. I add my voice to theirs. Since I have the memory card with a large capacity (60 pictures in "best" mode) I avoid the problem by taking a lot of shots, hoping I got at least one good one, and then walking over to a shady area to erase the ones I don't want.

Back to Daruma Festival Photos
Back to DC120 Pages Index