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Scrolling Digacam Images on the Palm Tungsten T
Since my Tungsten T and Casio Exilim EX-Z40 both work with SD Cards, I was always tempted to somehow make use of this feature and browse the pictures from the camera on the PDA. See how it works!
Sep 2004
With my Casio Exilim EXZ-40 point-and-shoot digital camera I had made 10 shots of a subject with different white balanace, zoom and shutter speed settings and then wanted to quickly choose the ones to keep. On the camera, though image management is quite easy, as scrolling through images is instantenous and the delete dialog is very user friendly, the only 2.0” large, 4:3 sized LCD of a so-so 84 960 pixel count limits my decision. What I miss on the Casio is screen resolution (though I can quickly zoom in, it is not the same as watching the whole image in high resolution) and screen size - while 2.0 is seen as an impressive novelty on a digicam this year, it is still to small to make a serious decision on keeping/deleting an image.
The Setup
As both my Palm Tungsten T and my Casio EX-Z40 accepts SD Cards, I thought to give a try and use the larger screen of the Tungsten T to check the images after exposition on the field. The Tungsten T has a 2,5”, 4:4 LCD with 102 400 pixels – slightly bigger and more pixels. To check the images, I have installed SplashPhoto 4.1 on the Palm. I also expected to exploit File Manager on the Palm to organize the pictures. The SD Card is a Panasonic 256 MB card, advertized with “10 MB/s” speed and considered as a very fast SD Card amond users. The pictures of the Casio are of 4 MP (2304 x 1728 = 3 981 312) size and of 4:3 ratio. So, checking the pictures of my digicam on my PDA looks ok in theory.
I took a couple of shots of a wine shop here in Graz with the Casio. While checking images on the camera is OK, I am not able to decide whether the image is unsharp, blurry because due to the slow shutter speed or has the right colors. While it works, it is not as useable as I thought before buying the camera. A higher resolution LCD would help for sure - better cameras have an LCD with 113 000 or 135 000 pixels and electronic viewfinders usually have 300 000 pixels.
How it does (not) work
So, I popped the card into the Tungsten T. After launching Splashphoto, images are searched for throughout the SD card and you get a list of all images in all folders/subfolders. If you switch to thumbnail view, it starts to scan, then it scans and scans. Wow, it takes his time to display the thumbnails, 6.5 seconds for every image. Switching to full screen mode makes me even more inpatient as it takes again 6.5 seconds to load an image every time I press the back or forward button.
In list mode you do not have to wait that much and you can immediately copy/delete
or whatever.
But how would you know which images to keep if there are no thumbnails?
Splashphoto rescans the images every time you switch view.
It takes an eternity for a fully loaded SD Card.
Images are not cached, so one always have to face this delay. This is very-very slow! Maybe faster SD Cards and better CPUs would make it faster. As I have the Panasonic 256 MB card advertized to be "10 MB/sec" - it is for sure the fastest of all the SD Cards I had - and the Tunsten already have a 144 MHz Texas processor, I did not expect such slugginess.
Waiting for the full screen image to load on the TT. Press "Next" for another
7 seconds of black screen.
Then, the quality of the image displayed on the TT is far inferior compared to that displayed on the Casio camera. The image is darkish, even at full brightness and blurry. I think this is not because of the origin of the pictures, but a limitation of the Tungsten T. I tried to transfer pictures from my laptop, too, using the Splashphoto conduit to show my family pics to friends. You know this gadget-geek feeling: you tell a story, then pull out the Tungsten T and show the action as a photo. Well, I was showing photos, but I gave it up soon, as I realized that I really did not impress people. For close ups, it was acceptable, but anything wide angle was looking inacceptable, being details hyper tiny to watch.
Finally, becauese the Tungsten T has a TFT of 4:4 (1:1) side ratio, the images are displayed only on part of the screen with a large black band on the top and the bottom and in fact the result is somewhat the same size as on the 2.0” LCD of the Casio camera.
Here's what you get 7 seconds later. This is a screenshot from the Tungsten T.
Note that because of the 4:4 screen side ratios, the 4:3 picture uses only part
of the 320x320 resolution. In fact, the image is displayed at 320x240, what is
about 77 000 pixels. This is less then the 85000 pixels of the Camera LCD!
Altough this screenshot is sharp, what you see on screen is actually of poor quality.
Hum, I am a bit disappointed, it would have been so nice to check images more in detail on the go. Maybe newer PDAs with a larger screen and higher resolution perform better. As of now (2004 Sep) I see two devices: the Toshiba E800 or the HP iPaq hx4700, as they both have 4” LCD size with 640x480 resolution – 307 200 pixels! They can display images in native 4:3 ratio full screen and they also have more CPU speed (400 and 624 MHz). I am really curious how would the HP hx4700 perform when sliding in the CF card from a Nikon D70 with an uncompressed 6 MP Tiff... as it accepts CFII formats, card speed should not be a problem when using the a Microdrive or one of the latest fast CF cards. Laptops are getting smaller, but it still does not compare to the simplicity of a PDA in one hand while having the camera in the other.
If you're in the mood of experimenting, you can download the images as a zip file and try it for yourself - I would be happy to hear about the results.
Conclusion
Reviewing images out of the digicam is possible on the Palm Tunsten T, but it is slow, images are blurry and small. Simply, the Tungsten T is not for dealing with photos. For such things one should consider a PDA with a fast CPU (400 MHz and over), high resolution (640x480) LCD, large screen (4”) and 4:3 side ratio and I guess a speedy memory card that both your PDA and camera can accept.
I really like my TT, but sorry for it, it gets only1 star out of 5 for checking digicam images.
Comments
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Links
Casio Exilim EX-Z40 Specifications - dpreview.com
Sample images zipped in one big file - casio-exilim-4mp.zip
Last edited on 29-Jan-2006.
(c) Imre Oliver Kozak and @Foxpop.
