Many moons ago, I was pondering the switch from PC to Mac, and I finally did do it. This thread concerns the evils of doing digital photography with my Mac.

My camera is a Canon PowerShot G1 -- two years old now, but still a fine 3MP camera, and one of the first consumer cameras to support a "raw" mode, so you don't have the camera using JPEG to destroy all the sutble details of your picture for you. But I digress...

On the PC, you can run Canon's official software, which has somewhat improved since it was first released. (The original version would re-prioritize itself, to make you painfully aware of just how slow the conversion code was. Gee, maybe you should learn about performance tuning? But I digress.) And, while the software was far from perfect, it did work.

Enter the Mac. I had missed the part where Apple should have said that iPhoto "supported" my camera only in as much as they support cheaper consumer cameras. Likewise, and Apple will rot in hell for this, my SanDisk USB CompactFlash reader originally appeared on Apple's list of supported input devices. SanDisk seems to think it works with no additional drivers. It doesn't work unless you boot into OS 9. But, even after you can get the data into the Mac, it still sucks to be you. Funny that. I also missed the part where Canon should have said that their "support" for the Mac is a joke, and that they refuse to release sufficient specs that a third party could do it themselves. Canon's Raw Image Converter is an OS 9 app, and it has a habit of failing.

So, I'm sitting here right now, at 2:30am, with my CF card in PC laptop, running the raw conversion software and writing to my Mac's hard drive. (And don't even get me started on what it took to get the PC to properly mount volumes from the Mac, and I can't seem to get the Mac to mount a volume from the PC, but I digress...) If I had only stayed with the PC universe, this whole operation would have taken half of the time.

And, how about this dialog box: An internal error has occured while converting the RAW image. (** Yes **) (-- No --)

Moral of the story

It's not the hardware, it's the software. I can't believe I'm seriously thinking about dumping my Canon camera for a Nikon, just to get better driver support. Nikon, to their credit, seems to be working to actually support the Mac. But the Nikon "prosumer" cameras can't focus in low light because they don't have a focus-assist lamp. Guess where I tend to take a lot of pictures? So, the only way to really solve my camera problem is to drop $2000 on a Nikon D100 and more on lenses. Arrrgggghhhh. That would work, technically, but my travel weight would go from one pound to over three pounds, which really does matter.

Maybe the right answer is to say "screw it" and get a Casio Exilim. No fancy features, but at least it's tiny.