In the late 1990s I left behind my beloved Apple QuickTake 100 as I moved up to a second-generation digital camera, the Kodak DC-120 (shown at left).

For the first time I was able to untether the camera from the computer. The Quicktake 100 could store only a handful of photos. I went out and purchased the largest Kingston PCMCIA flash RAM card available, which allowed me to store around 120 images on the card. It was amazingly liberating to walk around Burning Man for an entire day and only in the evenings pull my "PowerBook" from its dusty bag to hold my daily catch of pictures.

There are two aspects to using a digital camera: storage and transfer. I've mentioned that the PCMCIA storage card (sometimes called a PC Card by those who can't remember that PCMCIA stands for "People Can't Memorize Computer Industy Acronyms" :-) holds many more images, but PowerBook users are also able to pop the card into the built-in card cage and transfer the images from card to computer in a mere fraction of the time needed by those who suck the images through the provided serial cable.

Each product has its quirks: the DC-120 stores images in a Kodak proprietary KDC format. Luckily Thorsten Lemke's excellent GraphicConverter software quickly added the KDC format to the list of those which it can process (for Mac OS 9; Kodak isn't allowing anyone to license the format for Mac OS X, a shrewd business move which follows their clever domination of the digital camera marketplace.)