While scanning the web for recent reviews and prices for the Canon FS4000US Film Scanner I chanced on a review by Peter Kun Frary on his website. Included in the review were some photos of Hawaii. A little more exploration on his site lead me to his Photography Index page where there are links to more reviews, and his online galleries.

My favourites? Hard to pick – there are so many amazing photos. Here’s a selection though, in no particular order:

• Beach Bodyscape
• Waianae Coast
• Kayaks at Waikiki
• Honolulu Harbor
• Leeward View of Honolulu

My olnly negative comment about the site is that there are no links between photos so you have to keep closing the pop-up window with the larger image in it, and selecting the next from the thumbnails. I’d prefer to see them in a slideshow format since they are all great photos!

In the end, I ordered the scanner from Adorama as they seem to have a very competitive price and, more importantly, good reviews and ratings both from mentions in FS4000US reviews and also on BizRate. All of the places with lower prices had comments associated with them regarding bait & switch tactics and other dubious, if not illegal, sales techniques. In my opinion, if a place has collected a number of reviews like that they are not worth the risk.

Stumbled on information about a single-use digital camera being sold by Ritz Camera and Wolf Camera for $10.99. The idea is that you snap 25 photos, take it back to them and pay some more for processing. It is a digital camera though, and that means that there must be a way of getting the images out of the camera and onto a computer…

Some hunting on the web lead to a number of sites dedicated to hacking this cheap little camera:

• John Maushammer’s Dakota Camera page
• T. R. Gipson’s cexx.org
• Geekteria’s Dakota Camera page
• Apache XMD’s Dakota Camera info

So, armed with all that information, I bought 6 of these cameras from the Ritz store at 2016 Market Street, San Francisco. Then I went to the Robert Austin Computer Show this weekend at the Oakland Convention Center to get the cables. I ended up getting four USB PDA charger cables for the Palm III (all he had). The connector for the Palm III is almost the same as the Dakota camera’s data port. Also picked up a $3 USB cable for the first cable (the charger cables only have two-core cable in them unfortunately).

Once home, there were two tasks that needed to be done to get the hardware working:

1. Make up the cable by carefully removing the connector from the charger cable, and soldering in the real USB cable in its place
2. Enlarging the opening a little, and removing the little plastic ribs from the camera’s data port

The first was easy following the instructions on the websites listed above. The second took a little more time as I carefully shaved down the plastic of the case using a small knife (the plastic is relatively soft and shaves off easily). The ribs I cut out using a small pair of wire cutters, and the smoothed down with a knife. Continue until the connector fits in the space tightly. Notice that the grey plastic in the port has the fittings for the little metal spring clips that hold the connector in place (so the connector they use in the stores must be very similar to this).

For the last two cameras in my set I might try to fit an alternative connector into the space (perhaps a mini-USB device connector so that a standard cable can be used with the camera).

Here are some photos of the cables I took – as always click the thumbnail for a popup larger image. I don’t have any close-up photos of the modification to the camera (will add some later), nor any shots taken with the camera. Look for those coming soon.

The software was easy too – I started with the Windows version downloaded from here. Make sure you download and install the LibUSB-win32 software before plugging in the camera. If you don’t, then you’ll need to deal with removing the entries from the Windows registry that mark the device’s USB ID as unknown (preventing you from ever being able to install a real driver for the device).

Photoshop, a very powerful tool for fixing photos and working with images, can also be used to distort news or history. This week it was the Kerry + Fonda photo. Back at the start of 2003 an LA Times photographer in Iraq was fired for altering a photo.

We also learnt recently that Adobe and others have added code to their photo editing software to prevent users from scanning in or manipulating images of bank notes.

Digital photo and image manipulation can be a very useful tool, and a lot of fun when used responsibly (I’ve used it to “relocate” people to exotic places, cut pictures of objects out of their background for use as floating images on web pages). It is a shame that some people out there want to use it to manipulate facts or break laws.