[If you’re just joining us, see part one.]
I recently felt like I needed a new crappy camera in my life. I found myself in a drugstore yesterday, where I purchased one of those miniature ones, a Vivitar Clipshot (née Sakar 11693). At $10, the price was right but it’s a little too cheap to have a screen built-in, and the “viewfinder” is a laughably inaccurate hole in the body. Even more exciting, I thought! It’ll be like taking photos with film and waiting to see what develops!
I couldn’t find reference to the camera working in Ubuntu with a quick Web search, but the specs on the package claimed that it works in OS X without drivers. This seemed to imply that it was a standard USB Mass Storage device, the kind you plug in and have just work, as it appears to the computer as a removable drive.
So I expected quick and easy access to my photos. I was wrong.
The OS detects the device, but not as a normal camera device, nor a Mass Storage device. This is what lsusb had to say about it:
Bus 007 Device 008: ID 0979:0371 Jeilin Technology Corp., Ltd
Searching for that lead me to a number of blog and forum posts where people discussed ways to possibly get the camera working, but to no avail. This post received a number of replies, with this reply being the most helpful: (emphasis mine)
Professor Theodore Kilgore from Alabama has been working on a driver for this camera. As of about 6 months ago, the Professor had me download his driver for the camera, and the driver lets download files from the camera. But since the pictures are stored in an encrypted format on the storage media of the camera, there is still work to be done to decrypt the picture files into a viewable format (this is the last I heard anyway).
The photos are stored encrypted on the camera, so you have to use the included Windows software to download them. Glad to know they’re being protected… from me. This crappy camera is a little too crappy for me. I haven’t tried it on a Mac yet, but I can’t imagine how this could possibly work without drivers.
There will be more crappy digital cameras in my life, but one can only hope that the next one sucks in the way it should.
Breaking news: This piece of garbage does not work in OS X either.
Aw, this makes me sad because that’s a cute little camera. Way to go, Vivitar. (Which reminds me of my original digital camera, I need not explain the crappiness.)
You suffered with that POS for so long. I am glad that you have your more-awesome Canon now.