Taking pictures with digital camera while it's attached to the USB port

Hi,

I have a Canon digital camera which seems not to allow pictures to be taken
while it is attached to the USB port of a Windows XP computer. Is this a
usual state of affairs, i.e. should I not be able to take pictures with a
digital camera while it is attached to the USB port? I've tried this on
another camera, and it seems to let me do so. Or is there some setting on a
camera that stops it from taking pictures while it is attached to the USB
port?

Thanks in advance,

 

Some of the early digital cameras, such as the Kodak DCS280, allowed you to
set up, change the shooting parameters, and capture images whist connected
to a USB port, but the practice seems to have been discontiued.

 

Check the camera's power requirements when operated from a
transformer (wall wart). Many of them require a much larger current
when the camera is used to take pictures than when it is only used
to review pictures, and this current is often greater than the
amount that the USB is specified to provide. I don't recall exactly
what the USB limit is, but think it's probably about 500ma, and
that's shared by all devices plugged into the USB.

 

Hi, and thanks for the response.

I thought that even if the camera was connected to the USB port, it could
still make use of the power supplied by the batteries? So then it wouldn't
matter even if USB couldn't provide all the power the camera needed to take
pics, because the camera would get this power from the batteries.

 

You don't say which model you have, but there's certaily a Canon
utility the lets you operate the DSLRs from your computer. Try the
Canon site under support / downloads.

 

That's possible, but perhaps the design goal is to use the USB
connection primarily for transferring pictures to the computer, and
if either the camera or the computer's USB port is v. 1.1 or v. 2.x
Full Speed, the transfer rate would be slow enough to seriously
deplete the batteries, and depending on the operation (MOVing vs
COPYing) there would be the risk of losing pictures if the batteries
died before the transfer completed. To eliminate this risk it's
probably best to use the USB port's power only to transfer files.

 

Might be a silly question,but are you sure the camera isn't staying in
"play" mode instead of "record" mode? My Canon has to be switched to
"play" to show up with the USB connection...just a thought.

Dave

--

 

I'm not sure what you're asking. When the computer is seeing pictures on
the camera you are in review mode. When you switch to take mode, the
power goes off. You can switch it back on a take pictures with the usb
cable plugged in. Maybe the other camera you looked at does things
differently.
Note, when using zoombrowser, which I no longer use, you can change
camera settings such as date/time, user name from the computer. I forget
what else it might let you do and that may be model specific anyway.
Dave Cohen

 

Hello Akin.

I have an EOS350D (a.k.a. RebelXT) and ZoomBrowser software on an elderly
laptop with USB 1.1 (or is it 1.2 .. anyway, it is slow).
ZoomBrowser allows me to set and fire the 350D via its screen and get the
resulting picture on the laptop.

Regards, Ian.

 

A question that may help to understand your question...
Why do you need to take a picture while the camera (which camera?) is
attached to the computer's USB port?

 

Hi Bill,

We're working on an application that uses a digital camera to capture
pictures of a person, then saves the picture to a file.

It would certainly be possible to take the picture while the camera is
disconnected then connect the camera and then save the picture to a file,
but if this had to happen for several persons, it would be tiresome to
disconnect and reconnect the camera everytime.

I hope this helps you understand better why I asked the original question.

Thanks,

 

There should have been software in the camera's box that would let you
connect the camera, and control it from the computer. No?
If not, see if the Canon USA site has it under support.
If you're trying to fire the camera by pressing the camera's shutter
release and somehow get the image to the camera with no other work, I
don't think it works that way.
It might help to know which Canon camera you have.

 

Hello John,

I made a mistake - the camera model is actually an Olympus (mu) Digital 500
camera.

And yes, you're right - I want to find out about taking pictured with
tethered cameras (I didn't know that was the phrase for it).

 

Hi...

Do a google for pine tree computing; they make what you're looking
for to control your Olympus camera.

Take care

Ken

 

There wasn't software in the box to do that?

 

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:16:04 +0100 in rec.photo.digital, "Epetruk"

You might think so. In practice, this would lead to thousands of
complaints and support calls along the lines of "My camera was
getting power from the USB port, so why are my batteries dead now?"