Digital Focus: Caring for Your Digital Camera
Some do's and don'ts for storing and maintaining your camera.Dave Johnson
Feature: Caring for Your Digital Camera
A digital camera is, well, a camera. And while it may not look like it, a camera is a delicate instrument that needs occasional maintenance and a modicum of careful handling to keep it in top form. If treated well, a digital camera can last for many years. I'm not exaggerating; I have an Olympus D-620L that I got back in 1998. It's only a 1.3-megapixel model, so I don't use it very often anymore, but it still works perfectly. I've also got an Olympus e10 that dates to early 2000, and it works like a champ as well. Can your digital camera last three to five years or more? Sure. You just have to know how to care for it.
Take Care of the Lens
The lens is your camera's window to the world; keep it clean. After all, your pictures can only be as good as the camera's optics, and a dirty lens can blur your images. That said, you should clean the lens only when necessary--overcleaning it can scratch the glass or remove essential coatings on its surface. To make sure you don't have to clean the lens more than necessary, never touch its surface or wipe it with anything except real lens cleaning material from a camera store. The modest expenditure for the proper cleaning supplies will pay off in improved longevity for your beloved camera. And when the camera isn't in use, cover the lens with a lens cap to keep dust and contaminants from collecting on it.
No matter how careful you are, though, you'll occasionally need to clean your camera lens. Start with a lens brush or a blower to remove the loose-clinging, abrasive particles. Then place a drop or two of lens cleaning fluid on some lens tissue or cloth and clean the lens in a light, circular motion. Don't put the liquid directly on the lens, and--to avoid scratches--don't press hard with the tissue.
You can use those same techniques to clean the optical viewfinder and LCD on your camera.
Avoid the Elements
When you use your digital camera outdoors, keep it dry and keep it out of extremely high temperatures. Avoid leaving it in your car, for instance, where temperatures can climb to well over 100 degrees in the summer. If you're using it out in the sun, you might want to cover it with a light-colored towel when it's not in use to protect the electronics (and even the adhesives in the assembly) from high temperatures.
Use Safe Storage
If you store your camera for extended periods of time, you can protect it from collecting moisture by sticking one or two pouches of silica gel in the bag or box. Many electronics come with silica gel, so you might want to save those little pouches the next time you buy a gadget. You can also buy them from most camera shops. (Note that silica gel works by drawing moisture out of the air, so it loses its effectiveness in humid conditions. Storing it in a warm, dry location will help it retain or regain its effectiveness.)
And watch out for magnets, too. While strong magnetic fields won't damage the camera itself, they can erase the contents of memory cards. Avoid putting your camera or spare memory cards right next to very strong magnets such as stereo speakers.
When you put your camera away for more than a few weeks, you should also remove the batteries and store them outside the camera's battery compartment; batteries can develop corrosive leaks over time.
And Finally, Protect the Delicates
You already know that your digital camera is delicate: Don't drop it or bounce it around too much. Likewise, the memory card is easily damaged. When you're taking pictures, be sure that the camera is done writing pictures to the memory card before you open the little door and pull the card out--most cameras have a flashing light that indicates the card is busy. If the camera is still writing data to a card when you yank it out, you can corrupt the card.
In addition, the CompactFlash Association has issued a warning about the potential of CompactFlash media's semiconductors' being damaged by the sanitizing irradiation sometimes used by the U.S. Postal Service: It's safer not to send CF cards through the mail.
Dave's Favorites: Watching Movies on Your Palm
From time to time I've mentioned tools for watching video clips on a PDA. In the last year, Palm PDAs have matured in a big way for video. Faster processors, a better operating system, and more memory finally allow you to watch TV shows and even full-length movies on a Palm device. One of the best programs for doing that is, no doubt, TealPoint Software's TealMovie.
The newest version of TealMovie makes watching video on a PDA a truly enjoyable affair. I recently used it to watch The Simpsons while flying. It's better than the in-flight TV, since the effective size of the Palm's display and a screen five aisles away is roughly the same--but you're totally in control. TealMovie supports very smooth 60 frame-per-second video with well-synchronized audio; I didn't notice any A/V disconnect when watching even lengthy clips. During playback, you can overdrive the speaker to sacrifice audio quality for more volume. And the biggest news: TealMovie lets you access videos wherever they're stored, even on expansion cards. That means you can load a two-hour film onto a big Secure Digital card and hunker down for the duration of the flight.
The program comes with a desktop video converter for Windows called TealMovie Encoder. Since the encoder supports only two video formats (AVI and MOV), you may need to use an intermediate converter to turn videos in common file formats like DIVX, WMA, and MPEG into something TealMovie Encoder understands. However, the encoder lets you optimize movies for a number of Palm OS models, including those with high-resolution 320-by-320 and 320-by-480 displays.
If you're looking for a great video player for your Palm PDA, the $25 TealMovie just might be your ticket.
Q&A: Connecting Your Laptop to a TV
A recent newsletter on running a Windows XP slide show on a TV prompted several readers to write, asking how to connect a notebook or PC to a television.
It's clear that I should have been more explicit. My advice--that you can connect a computer to a television to watch a digital image slide show--only works if your computer has some sort of analog video output. These days, many desktop computers have what you need, but only about half of the notebooks I've seen do.
You can't connect the standard wedge-shaped, 15-pin VGA port to a television. Instead, most TVs accept either a composite video plug or, sometimes, an S-Video input.
If your TV has a composite video input but your computer has only an S-Video port, you're in luck; you can get an S-Video-to-composite adapter at any computer or electronics store. But there's no simple or inexpensive way to go from the standard VGA port to composite video, so my slide show advice won't work for all computers.
Hot Pic of the Week
Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.
Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.
This week's Hot Pic: "Three Pears," by Judith Secco, Bantam, Connecticut
Judith says that she took this photo of the pears indoors, using natural light. She continues: "I then created a second layer in Photoshop 7 using brown tones and painted in a new background. I used the dry brush effect on the pears themselves to create sort of an old-style painting effect."
We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.
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