I have an IPEVO camera and it works great for close-ups, but it is a small aperture lens and a document camera which means that it's forte is an area 8-1/2" X 11" or smaller, therefore it's not much good for displays of multiple knives. I own a nice camera, a Canon SX30 IS and while it takes great pictures, it's not very convenient for the knife stuff because of all the back and forth I have to do. I can't tell if I have a good picture or not looking at a 2" diagonal screen, and I have to either connect it with a cable and wait or pull the chip and get it into my PC via a slot (if I have one) or a USB chip reader. Typically after I do this, I don't like the shot and have to take more pictures and go through the whole thing over again. My friend, Don, correctly pointed out that I need to tether my camera to the PC, but only a bit of internet research revealed that my camera doesn't support that. I did however, blunder across something called an EyeFi card, and after a bit ordered the following two items. Note, I'm not endorsing these or advertising, I'm just relating what I did and how it worked.
Before I get into the details I need to explain the issue I am trying to address. I've read a lot of gripes and a few suggestions from other forum members about what does and doesn't work for taking good knife pictures. You need lots of light to pick out the tiny details and show the lovely colors that make our hearts race. Everyone seems to have a favored computer or camera, or maybe they are trying to work around having only one of each. It's difficult to make any given combination work under all circumstances. Take me for example, I'm typing this on a full sized ergonomic keyboard using a under the desk PC in my office, this is where the picture files need to end up to start the process of sending them to the forum. It's also after 10 PM and pitch black outside - so what if I want pictures now? In my case, there are several plug in lamps with 5250° Kelvin (daylight) bulbs out in my screen room. If it were daytime, there'd be plenty of light. There are a couple of problems. I can't practically relocate my computer out there. By the time I get enough light, it bounces off reflective surfaces like polished metal and shiny scales and that doesn't work. I need bright light, but diffused light. So after I deal with all that, I need pictures from some camera to some portable entity that I can use to get the files on my desired computer. Being a computer geek I've got lots of computers of all types. So a little Windows 7 netbook works to carry out to my 'studio' and I just need to get the files on that, then move them somehow to main PC. With the IPEVO, I plug in a USB drive and save the files right on that. I yank it out of the netbook and pop it into my 'big' PC and I'm ready to rock. But it would sure be nice if I could use the Canon instead sometimes, only it won't connect directly to the netbook. What I describe in this post gets me very close.
OK, most of you have cameras that use some type of memory card, or in my case something called an SD chip. My smart phone, Android tablet and Windows 8 convertible use a micro-SD which is the same thing in a tiny format. The first item below is a cheapo card reader that allows me to plug an SD or micro SD chip into my big computer. It also enables me to deal with certain features of the EzShare card.
Here's a close-up of the reader with the door open to show the two slots for two sizes of SD chips.
(IPEVO, lamps, taken just now)Now there are a couple of important considerations to mention at this point. First off, there are various brands of these WiFi SD chips and they come in different sizes. The 8 GB chip is not large compared to many others these days, but it still holds a lot of pictures. Also, since it can be regarded as temporary storage, it seems adequate. All of these chips seem to have compatibility issues with various cameras. This one worked fine in my camera, and it was the cheapest that I could find.
So you insert the chip into your camera, formatting if necessary (it wasn't in my case) and turn the camera on. At this point your camera is sending out a Wifi signal powered by your camera battery (so it does use up power). You need to go into your camera configuration and turn off the timed power down. The Wifi is only working while the camera is powered up, and every time it shuts down the connection gets broken. It needs to stay up as I will explain in a second.
I have wireless Internet in my home. I'm assuming you all know how to check which connections are available and select the one to connect to. That's why EzShare needs to be running. Until I disabled my camera's power down, it kept taking the Wifi off-line, and as soon as that happened, my netbook would reconnect to the home Internet. When you connect to EzShare you can't surf the net or do email, it's only a camera connection. When you go to connect, you need the default password - in this case 88888888 (eight eights). Then you open a browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, whatever) and type 'EZ' (or anything so the instructions say) in place of the URL. At that point you see a picture like in the next two shots.
Whichever shots you have taken in the normal matter and saved to the card show in the window. As you take more pictures you have to 'refresh' the 'web page'. You can download one or all shots. You can click on any shot and zoom in. You can right click and 'save as'. The next picture was saved to my thumb drive. The two pictures of the 'page' came from a screen capture program called SnagIt. This is not a particularly noteworthy picture. It's just a snap shot inside my screen room using the Canon camera.
Once you have whatever pictures you desire, you can erase them from the chip and turn the timed power off back on (to save your camera battery during normal operation). Simply replace the Wifi chip with your normal camera chip and your camera is back to normal. I won't use this solution all of the time, but it's a pretty good solution some of the time.
Even using my netbook's 10" screen gives me a much better idea if I have a decent picture or not. Also, since I get more or less immediate feedback and everything is still set up - it's easy to take more shots until I get what I want and/or need. I hope this gives you some ideas.
The instructions that come with the chip are of the "English as a second, or third, language" variety. Fortunately, the setup is pretty intuitive to a geek like me and with enough hints I was able to puzzle it out. If any of you go this route, please let me know how it worked out for you. My next post, under another topic will be some knife sets I have.
Forgot to mention: There is a point where it may be desirable to reconfigure the chip, or reset it to factory defaults. This involves deleting a certain file off the chip. I bought the card reader so that I could do than, plus read all my micro SD chips.
My best to you all,