I just tried Kamera after quite a long time and it actually worked. Thank you!
It isn't, however, very feasible to use because the device file is owned by root: you always have to change its permissions manually before starting Kamera as a non-root user. I found a small daemon called usb-perms (and packaged it into a .deb as an excercise) that can change them automatically whenever a device is plugged in, but started wondering if there is a more standard way of making Kamera usable in the user-land? - Jarno