P3D Digital cameras and file storage

[perryd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I just bought a Kodak DC210 and have been fairly happy so far.  I
took a couple of stereo pairs and "built" my own .jps images and
viewed them with my shutter glasses.  It is 3D but my equipment is
not the greatest and it is doing strange things to the aspect ratio.
I think a new system with a better monitor would help a lot.  

Getting images from the CompactFlash card to the desktop is a 
problem right now.  They make internal card readers that fit in a
slot or external readers that attach to a parallel port but the
internals are not portable and the externals are slow.  Several
companies are promising to have available card readers that will
plug into the USB port and claim 12Mb/sec speeds.  Direct USB 
connections would seem even better, USB seems like a great step
toward a fast, easy, universal, hot pluggable connection. I really
hate rebooting Win95 every time I do anything.  I assume these
card readers will work just like the PCMCIA slots on laptops, my 
current method of unloading pictures.  I have an adapter for my
CompactFlash card that allows it to plug into a PCMCIA slot and 
Win95 usually recognizes it, loads the drivers and treats it like
another hard drive.  Download speeds are good and it is easy to 
manipulate the files.

  I am then copying the files to a ZIP drive for portability.
The bad part is the ZIP drive I have uses the parallel port and is
rather slow.  A ZIP drive using the USB port would seem to be a
wonderful thing but I have not seen it yet and have been hearing
horror stories about IOMEGA and wonder if I did the right thing
going with a ZIP drive.
  
The process of taking/downloading/manipulating/viewing a digital
3D picture is very cumbersome right now, it makes mounting Realist
format slides look easy.  A true 3D digital camera should be no
problem to produce so I am optimistic that we will see a digital
"Realist" show up one of these days with software that will function
as the digital "Red Button" and make this process a little less
labor intensive.  The big advantage (or curse as some will find) 
will be the flexibility to control lens separation, convergence etc.
once we are free from the film limitations.

_______________________ Reply Separator _______________________

Subject: P3D PHOTO-3D digest 2638
Author:  photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at internet-ext
Date:    3/20/98 10:02 PM



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