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Digital Cameras on Fujitsu chipset

this page does not cover all digital cameras with serial interface, just some models.

There seems to be a semi-standard digital camera technology used by serveral vendors, namely Agfa, Epson, Olympus, Sanyo and Nikon, characteristic of in-camera JPEG compression of pictures and specific data transfer protocol. The latter is most interesting because the cameras are shipped with only Windows and OS/7 software and are hard to operate if you do not have any of those systems on your computer.

On Fujitsu WWW site, there is a reference claiming that Epson PhotoPC camera is based on Fujitsu's SPARClite® embedded-RISC processor, model MB86933H. Also, it is known that the firmware for Agfa cameras is provided by Sierra Imaging, Inc.

It seems that the following models are all based on Fujitsu chipset and use the same firmware:

I've compiled an incomplete description of the protocol using unofficial sources (mainly snooping in the serial line), and made a library and command-line tool running on UNIX, Windows 95/NT and DOS that is well-tested with Epson PhotoPC 500 model (and thus the name "photopc"), but is likely to work with other compatible cameras. Support for Win32 and DOS done by Bruce Lightner. He also has a casual user's guide for this software.

The project is undeway of making a Macintosh version of the program.

Source code and other related information can be obtained from the project page at SourceForge:

Starting from version 3.02, there also exists a .zip file containing the same source plus pre-built Win32 and MS/DOS binaries.

Here is the archive maintained by Bruce Lightner containing some earlier and modified versions of the program built for Win32 and MS/DOS.

The program is provided in the source form and is free to distribute and use for any purpuse.

There is a Tcl/Tk frontend for photopc program written by Payton R. White (link is dead).
And here is a newer TCL/TK frontend by John Bowman.
Hey! There is third TCL/TK frontend!


Here are a few links related to the protocol and software written by other people for the same type of cameras:


There are other models with serial interface, that use different communication protocol. Here are some resources related to these cameras:

Here was (but is not anymore) a most elaborate list of digital camera related internet resources located on the server maintained by itojun

Eugene Crosser <crosser at average dot org>


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