Digital cameras are wonderful toys, however, there is one major drawback, very few of them have Amiga drivers.
All of these solutions are lacking in convenience, and incurr additional expense, not to mention a possible degradation of image quality.
What is required is native Amiga support, that's what AmiCam is all about.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using having an application. On the positive side, it provides a clean tailored interface to the camera. This interface can be tailored to the camera and control every function of the camera. On the downside, it introduces another stage into the gathering of images - you have to run the application, you have to save out images which will probably end up being loaded into some kind of image processing program for scaling and further adjustment.
Writing a loader means that the image is directly available within an image processing program, it removes the download step. However, there are several image processing programs, each with their own loader formats. Clearly, a lot of the core functions will be shared by loaders for different image processing programs, however, it's more work to support each and every program.
A Digital Camera is a storage device. It stores images. Images can be copied from the camera, or saved to the camera. Writing a handler for the camera will allow the camera to be mounted as a storage device, an icon will appear on workbench, which can be opened the same as any other disk, and icons will be created from the thumbnail info for each picture. This allows any application direct access to the camera, as well as simplifying use from scripts for running web-cams etc.
Clearly, one essential item for development is the Digital Camera. I have access to a couple - a Casio QV10a, and a Casio QV100. In addition, there are some excellent descriptions of the protocols followed by these cameras, without which, development would have been a lot slower. See the links at the bottom of this page.
If you have a digital camera that is not currently supported there is no reason why it cannot be supported. I'll give you any assistance I can in figuring out the protocols. I'm also willing to do the job for you, however, for any meaningful progress to be made, it's obviously essential to have a camera for testing. I managed to figure out the QV protocols and get a bare bones image downloader within one weekend.
One interesting side effect of writing your own software is that it's sometimes possible to get improved performance from the camera. For instance, the QV10a stores images internally at a size of 480x240 using non square pixels. The PC software then scales these images down to 320x240 to get square pixels. Clearly this process results in a loss of information. The Amiga downloading software does not do this aspect ratio correction - it's up to you to scale the image in a proper image processing program, this allows you to get better results.
There is a fully working downloader for Casio cameras. This has been tested on the QV10a and QV100, but it should work for all of the casio range. It is very bare bones at the moment, and requires you to build a patch for the interface cable. Documentation is minimal, it's only really intended for debugging the routines which talk to the camera. I'm attempting to wrap some handler code around these routines, and Giles is writing a GUI for it.
This used to be available for download here, but after it was mentioned in CU Amiga, and attributed to someone else, I decided to remove it to avoid any possible confusion. It's a hack, and should be treated as such, however, if you want it, you'll have to email me.