Welcome to the October Issue of Glen Cove Computing News. This month's feature article Film, We Don't Need No Stinkin' Film! will give you some tips on evaluating and purchasing a digital camera. In this twelfth issue of Glen Cove Computing News you'll also find:
Almost three years ago my wife Andrea and I planned to go to Australia for our honeymoon. When our travel plans fell through, I promised her that someday we would get to Australia. Well that someday has arrived and we'll be leaving for Australia on October 12, 1996! We wanted our friends and family to share in our experiences, so I began to look for a way to keep in contact with them while we were in Australia. While searching the web for information on Australia I found The Trip Down Under! page of Charlie and Rivian Bass. In September of 1995, a long lost cousin who lived in Australia invited Charlie and Rivian to visit him. Rivian is a part-time teacher at the Ricks Center in Denver Colorado and she wanted a way that her students, as well as friends and family, could join them on their trip using the Internet. Charlie, a computer systems consultant, arranged all the necessary Internet connections in Australia and New Zealand. Using a digital camera and their World Wide Web server in Colorado, they posted a daily story with pictures for Rivian's students. This enabled her students to stay in contact with their teacher and get real time exposure to Australia and New Zealand.
Seeing their pages gave me the inspiration to attempt to document our own trip in the same way. This meant that I would either have to purchase a digital camera or pack my scanner in our luggage. Since my flatbed scanner weighs about 15 pounds and a digital camera is under a pound, the choice was obvious. Of course before I purchased a digital camera I needed to do some research. Luckily the feature article in the July issue of NetGuide was a Digital Camera Shoot-Out complete with sample pictures. I found out that while digital cameras have dropped in price recently they're still not a small purchase. The digital cameras I looked at ranged in price from $500 to $3700. After deciding that spending more than $1000 on a new toy would have serious ramifications for my marriage, I concentrated on three of the least expensive models: the Epson PhotoPC; the Kodak DC40; the Casio QV-30.
In the NetGuide article the Epson PhotoPC "grudgingly" got the nod as their Best Buy. The Epson PhotoPC sells for approximately $499, although I've seen it as low as $439 through mail order. It can store sixteen 640x480 pictures at a time and for $250 you can buy a RAM expansion module that will increase the number of pictures stored up to 80. The pictures are transferred to your PC via a serial cable and stored in JPEG format. The average size of the pictures is between 20k and 60k which makes it easy and quick to transfer them from the camera to your Windows PC. It also comes with software that allows you to: preview the pictures that were taken; transfer and delete pictures; organize, edit, and enhance the pictures. There's a built-in flash, an auto shut-off feature, and it accepts optional lenses and filters (e.g. telephoto lens; wide angle lens). The PhotoPC is powered by four AA batteries and an optional AC Adapter is available for $99. The PhotoPC was also designated Best Buy in the CNET Review of Digital Cameras. The drawbacks include the aforementioned very pricey AC Adapter, a substandard viewfinder that you would find on the cheapest of 35 mm cameras, and some fuzziness around the edges of the pictures.
The Kodak DC40, which is actually made by Chinon, can store three times as many pictures (48) as the PhotoPC and at a higher resolution (756x504). The DC40 sells for approximately $700, although I've seen it as low as $599 through mail order. The DC40 features exposure control and a threaded lens that accepts a variety of lens accessories for taking close-up, wide-angle and telephoto pictures. In addition the supplied lithium batteries let you take up to 500 pictures. The pictures are transferred to your PC via a serial cable and once acquired, typical image file sizes are just over one megabyte. The DC40 comes with PhotoEnhancer software from PictureWorks that makes it easy to transfer and edit pictures on either a Macintosh or Windows computer. Surprisingly I found the image quality on the DC40 to be inferior to that of the Epson PhotoPC and the image size wasn't practical for posting to the internet.
The Casio QV-30 was the only camera I looked at that had a built-in telephoto lens setting and a 2.5 inch LCD viewfinder. It can store ninety-six 480x240 pictures at a time and pictures are transferred to your PC via a serial cable. That pretty much sums up the positive attributes of the QV-30. Of the three cameras I considered buying, the Casio produces the poorest quality pictures, has the lowest resolution, and does not have a built-in flash. The pictures were blurry, overexposed, and not suitable for even casual picture taking. The QV-30 sells for approximately $689, although in my opinion it's not worth even half that price. I should note that to round out my research I looked at two other low-end digital cameras: the Kodak DC20 ($329) and the Casio QV-10A ($499), but the image quality on both was lousy.
Well after weighing all the reviews and carefully comparing pictures from each of the three cameras, I picked the Epson PhotoPC. While it has some major shortcomings, it does provide the best value of the digital cameras available for under $1000. I'll be using the PhotoPC to document our trip to Australia and will be posting the pictures on a daily basis by dialing into CompuServe and MSN sites. If you want to see the results check out our Adventures in Oz page starting October 14. I promise (or at least hope) that our pictures will be more exciting than your neighbor's last vacation slide show. Until then here's a thumbprint of a picture that my wife took with the PhotoPC. You can click on the thumbprint to see the full picture in 640x480 resolution. Note that this image will look best if you have a video driver that supports 16 or 24 bit HiColor resolution. Also please note that I am the one on the left and that is not my real hair!
Below this article you'll find some links to Digital Photography Resources that I've found on the Internet. Check them out as these sites include digital images created by professional photographers with a lot more talent and better equipment than I. Please note that some of these sites may contain artistic representations of nudity. If you feel you will be offended by this type of content do not visit these sites.
The Internet Site of the month for October is SHAREWARE.COM. It's big, it's growing, it's well organized, and it's fun. This c|net site offers a megamenu of shareware programs, fixes, updates, games, and utilities searchable and downloadable by platform, popularity, and function. You can also subscribe to Shareware Dispatch, a weekly e-mail report about the latest stuff.
SHAREWARE.COM is a service from c|net: The Computer Network that features the Virtual Software Library (VSL) search engine and much more. You can search for, browse, and download the best software -- including freeware, shareware, demos, fixes, patches, upgrades -- from the top managed software archives and computer vendor sites on the Internet. Keep abreast of new arrivals and most popular files by subscribing to Shareware Dispatch, their weekly email newsletter. Archive managers can also register their FTP archives to make their files searchable at SHAREWARE.COM. I've been using shareware libraries since the days of the IBM File Finder on CompuServe and this blows them all away.
Cartoon of the Month
Thanks to Gabe Martin for placing his comic strip in the public domain. See more of Gabe's work at
The Intranet Technology of the month for October 1996 is NetMeeting from Microsoft. NetMeeting is Microsoft's entry into the world of Intranet real-time communications. While I despise many aspects of Microsoft's marketing strategy (i.e. Vaporware 2000), NetMeeting is the real thing. A real-time Intranet communications client that provides true multi-user application-sharing and data conferencing capabilities. NetMeeting provides the following features for audio and data conferencing on the corporate intranet:
The Internet Phone allows you to communicate with point-to-point audio conferencing over a corporate Intranet, allowing voice calls to be placed to others in your company. Microsoft also claims that you can use this to place voice calls over the Internet. Don't believe it unless you have at least an ISDN connection to the Internet. The audio quality on a 28.8 modem connection is extremely poor. You might be able to have a conversation if you repeat yourself about twenty times until the person on the other end of the connection figures out what you're saying. But on a private Wide Area Network connected by T1 or T3 lines this could offer a company substantial savings over traditional long distance.
Multipoint Data Conferencing allows two or more people to communicate and collaborate as a group in real-time over the corporate intranet. NetMeeting enables users to work together by sharing applications, exchanging information between shared applications through a shared clipboard, transferring files, collaborating on a shared whiteboard, and communicating with a text-based chat feature. Again Microsoft claims that this can also be done on the Internet. If you do try it with anything less than an ISDN connection, expect to sit staring at your PC for everything but the text-based chat feature and the shared whiteboard. Sharing applications over the Internet while possible, is not feasible because of the delays in refreshing the application screen on the remote client.
I believe that products like NetMeeting will be the "killer app" for the Intranet. Larger companies especially will benefit from the multi-user application-sharing and data conferencing capabilities. While it isn't as "sexy" as Video Conferencing, it uses a lot less bandwidth and can be implemented today in most WAN environments. The cost savings could be substantial for your company, although you should be prepared to provide some training for your employees. After all not everyone is Internet literate these days, no matter what the media says. For those of you who are interested you can download a free copy of NetMeeting from Microsoft's web site.
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