Digital cameras, digital camera software (especially Cameraid) and Keyspan USB Serial Adapters

Juri Munkki, author of Cameraid (software for use with digital cameras), offered the following comments regarding problems using digital cameras connected to iMacs via Keyspan USB serial adapters (as mentioned here last time):

"Just before Cameraid 1.1.1 was released, the compiler was upgraded and optimization settings were changed slightly. Some hardware configurations, such as Keyspan serial adapters were not tested with that version and a bug that would put Cameraid into an infinite loop in some cases passed through undetected. This bug was fixed in release 1.1.2.

The Keyspan adapter seems to require quite a bit of power to work correctly. It's entirely within the USB specification, but apparently Apple's USB implementation is not. To work around this problem, Keyspan suggests that the USB adapter should be connected to the iMac directly. The keyboard hub may not provide enough power for the adapter.

Users should have the latest system software (8.5.1) and latest Keyspan drivers.

With Cameraid, both ports on the USB serial adapter should work equally, so users who have more than one serial device should use Cameraid, if the software that comes with the digital camera only supports fully emulated ports (such as the printer port). In any case, Cameraid is likely to be faster and has the advantage of working transparently in the background, so it doesn't tie up computer resources.

For more information on troubleshooting digital camera connections, please consult the Cameraid manual. The section on memory card readers should be especially useful to users who are experiencing problems with the serial port adapters.

There is a development version of Cameraid 1.1.3d5 available. It is considered experimental, but has been downloaded by hundreds of users. It contains some changes to how the downloads are handled and may offer improved reliability and performance to some users. Documentation and extras are not included with the development version, so users are strongly urged to download the official 1.1.2 release before trying version 1.1.3d5.

All links will soon be available via a new Cameraid domain."