Digital Photography Pocket Guide

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The Toshiba PDR-M11 camera has a 1.3 megapixel sensor, USB interface, and uses a SmartMedia memory card. It can take pictures at 1280x960 resolution or 640x480 resolution.

There are two ways to get pictures out of this camera with Linux. You can talk to it directly through its USB interface using GPhoto 2 or read the SmartMedia card with a separate card reader.

I had mixed results with GPhoto. The PDR-M11 uses a proprietary protocol on the USB connection. It does not use either the USB mass-storage interface, nor the newer standard PTP digital camera protocol. I was able to use both gtkam and the command-line gphoto tool to list pictures on the camera, and retrieve them one at a time. However, attempting to retrieve more than one picture at a time aborted with an unknown error. And more than once it locked up the machine hard in Fedora Core 1, presumably from a USB kernel driver problem. This is highly unusual in my Linux experience and not acceptable.

Reading the SmartMedia card with a separate card reader worked fine. Needless to say, I'm sticking with that method.

The particular one I got (used on EBay) has a problem with blocky pixelation at 1280 resolution, which does not happen at 640 resolution. Strange artifact lines appear along contrasting areas such as edges or borders of objects. You can see a 1280 problem picture and 640 clean picture taken of the same scene, to compare. This happens regardless of whether the picture is taken in JPEG or TIFF mode, and regardless of whether it is downloaded through GPhoto or read directly from the SmartMedia card. The problem is quite obvious looking at most pictures, so I am therefore assuming it is not a design flaw with the M11 but rather that my particular camera is broken somehow.

It still works fine in 640x480 mode, and produces better 640x480 pictures than the Polaroid Fun Flash 640.

• Camera specifications
• Owner's Manual