At 11:17 AM -0800 11/16/99, Spencer S. Chen, Esq wrote:
>Works excellent. No Cardbus required for the 2400. I have the Fujifilm
>version. $75USD at buy.com (no relationship).
>
>Comes up as a XMB drive/card that is PC formatted wherein X is the size of
>the SmartMedia card. You can write info to it as the Finder info is
>written and it shows up on my ThinkPad as a HD. You can delete the info
>for more space on the card (if you can see it on a PC). If someone knows
>if the CompactFlash adapter works in the same way on a 2400, I might
>consider a camera using the CF as the cards just hit 320MB.
Yes, they do work the same way. A coworker has a camera that uses
CompactFlash, and we tried using his CF PCMCIA adapter in my 2400.
You just plug the CF card into the adapter, slide it into a PC card
slot, and it shows up on the desktop as a drive. No drivers, no
hassle, plug and play.
CF adapters cost less than $20 if you look around. They're cheaper
than SmartMedia adapters because they're just a mechanical adapter;
CompactFlash uses the same electrical interface as PCMCIA in a
physically smaller card. When you use a CF card in an adapter, it's
really more or less the same thing (as far as the computer is
concerned) as those PCMCIA flash cards you can buy.
(Ironically, SmartMedia is a lot dumber than CompactFlash. CF isn't
just for flash memory cards; it can be used for anything PCMCIA or
CardBus can, while SmartMedia is designed only for flash memory and
has zero smarts on board the card.)
>One caveat, though very minor. You cannot edit a .jpg and write it back
>to the card and view it on your camera. At least not on a Fuji 600MX.
>For some reason, Photoshop doesn't write the .jpgs back in a completely
>standard format or the camera doesn't use one.
I'm pretty sure Photoshop writes standard JPEGs. JPEG is a very
flexible and comprehensive image format, so it's a lot of work to
support everything it does. Probably the camera only knows how to
use a small subset of JPEG's features (exactly what it needs and no
more), so if you throw anything else at it, it won't read it.
>Oh yeah, don't format the
>card in the 2400 either.
Most (all?) cameras format the card with the DOS FAT file system,
because support for DOS FAT is nearly universal. (This means that if
you turn off PC Exchange, you won't have such a nice and easy
experience when you plug one of these cards into a PowerBook -- MacOS
will complain and ask if you want to reformat the card!)
Tim Seufert
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