December 27, 2008

We bought the Argus Sprout Digital Camera for one of my son's christmas gifts. In short, anyone who reads this, don't buy this POS, flush your 15 bucks down the toilet instead.

Picture quality is significantly worse than I expected. Worse even than the free cameraphones I've had from Sprint.

There is no way to use this camera in Linux either. I even got the newest libgphoto from SVN, and found it capable of returning the picture count, and nothing else. It seems the chip manufacturer uses some strange, proprietary compression technique (surprise) and nobody has been able to figure it out yet (alas, that kind of program is way out of my league). We have to use the XP machine to get the photos off this camera, which means my son can't use his own computer with his own camera.

At least his new MP3 player worked perfectly, out of the box, on his Ubuntu machine.

From: Amazon.com: Argus Sprout Digital Camera