Olympus camera capture/Erdman/VM95

Hello,

I've seen a few links here regarding the Erdman software - I've been
to their website (http://www.video-monitoring.com/hobbyist.htm), but
the price for their hobby package ($795) is way more than I want to
spend. I also don't understand why it requires a certain model
Olympus camera to function.

I like the idea of connecting a handheld digital camera with lots of
megapixels to the USB port on my computer, then somehow remotely
capturing an image to be viewed on the internet.

I've got lots of handheld digital cameras, it would be wonderful if
I could use one of them to do this automatically.

Are there other software packages that aren't picky about using a
certain brand/model camera?





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Taz wrote:
Hello,

I've seen a few links here regarding the Erdman software - I've been
to their website (http://www.video-monitoring.com/hobbyist.htm), but
the price for their hobby package ($795) is way more than I want to
spend. I also don't understand why it requires a certain model
Olympus camera to function.

I like the idea of connecting a handheld digital camera with lots of
megapixels to the USB port on my computer, then somehow remotely
capturing an image to be viewed on the internet.

I've got lots of handheld digital cameras, it would be wonderful if
I could use one of them to do this automatically.

Are there other software packages that aren't picky about using a
certain brand/model camera?
It is not so much that the software is 'picky' about using a certain
brand/model of camera...it is more to do with the camera itself. It is
fundamental with this kind of software that the camera must be able to
be controlled by the computer and a lot of them can't...it is as simple
as that! While all digital cameras can be connected to a computer only
some models from various makers have the ability to have all their
functions controlled by the computer...this includes shutter speed,
apeture setting, zoom, and not forgetting shutter activation (taking a pic!)
The reason VM95 is for Olympus cameras is simply that all brands have
their own firmware and VM95 was written to take advantage of the Olympus
firmware...and by the way, the VM95 software is free. You only have to
pay for the package if you want the camera, etc along with it.
If you haven't got a compatable Olympus camera, you could take a look at
PS Remote for certain models of Canon cameras but there is a couple of
'downsides' to PS Remote:
1) It is not free.
2) It is not capable of renaming the image it takes when it saves it to
your HDD.
3) It is not capable of uploading an image to the web (if this is what
you wanted to do). To do this you will need another package. When I was
using PS Remote I used Auto FTP (also not free) to upload the image and
rename it on the site. Auto FTP also deleted the image from the HDD.
This was handy because PS Remote uses the Canon numbering system when
storing the images and this results in images being labelled
IMG0001.jpg, IMG0002.jpg, etc. By deleting the image after uploading,
the Canon started the numbering system at the beginning again, so the
saved image was always IMG0001.jpg. This made it easier to setup AutoFTP
as all it had to 'look' for was that filename.
There are also other packages for various brands/models of cameras, but
most of them run under Linux, or are no longer supported by their authors.
While VM95 is a bit 'difficult' (!!!!) to initially setup, it is very
stable and I have been using it for over a year now without any trouble.
I bought an old Olympus C730 3.2Megapixel camera from eBay for about AU$40.
For PS Remote I was using an old Canon A70....which in my opinion has a
better image quality than the Olympus..but the combination of the two
software packages gave me a bit of grief as sometimes AutoFTP would stop
responding if it couldn't get a quick connection to the net, or if the
site was slow to respond then the images would build up
(IMG0002,0003,0004,0005, etc) and AutoFTP wouldn't upload anything
because there was no IMG0001 to 'find'. I eventually got around that
problem by setting up another upload 'schedule' to 'look' for a file
named 'IMG00**.jpg' after it had uploaded (or couldn't find)
IMG0001.jpg. This cured the second problem, but I couldn't cure the
first problem.
If I could get it all sorted out properly I would go back to using the
Canon simply because of it's image quality.
Hope this all helps!