I have been dabbling, rather heavily some might say, into digital photography
for a while.  You neglected to mention what resolution you are envisaging and
how many images would be going into this database on a daily basis.

In January 2001, the best non-professional cameras are producing images at a
resolution of up to 3.34 megapixels.  These cameras can produce two types of
images, JPEG and TIFF.  JPEG (Joint Photography Experts Group) is a compression
method which takes a 9 megabyte image (3.34 megapixels) and will compress it
down to 1MB, 500KB or 300KB, depending on the compression requested.  JPEG is
not a lossless process and repeated compression of the image will affect it.
 JPEG 2000 is an upcoming lossless format that will compress without losing any
data.  TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)  is a non-compression format that is
used by professionals to work on, print and store their images.  It does not
deteriorate with repeated opening and saving.  Whilst TIFF files are quite
large, they can easily be compressed on a computer by a lossless compression
algorithm, i.e. any compression program or device.

Nevertheless, the image files can be quite large.  In the olden days of DP
(mid-90's), the cameras would have a serial port attachment to the computers.
 This was fine when the images were 640X480 (900KB to start, compressing to
90KB or less.)  Pumping tens of thousands of bytes via serial connection was
OK, but not tens of millions of bytes.  Therefore the newer, higher resolution
cameras are sporting USB or Firewire connections and removable storage.

USB does not exist on the HP e3000, and I seriously doubt it will ever appear.
 Firewire might be a possibility in the future (a guess on my part,) but not
for years.  However, whether serial, USB or Firewire connection, there has to
be a program on the computer driving the download.  I do not know of any such
program on the HP 3000, though it might be possible to create one for the
serial port.

So you are left with removable storage.  Such storage comes in 2 forms, solid
state or optical.  The most common is solid state, in the form of Compact Flash
(CF).  You can get a PC-card adapter and plug the CF card into your system, if
it has a PC-card slot (virtually all notebooks do) and the CF card appears like
a disk to the system.  You can then transfer the files at very high speed.
 There are other forms of solid state storage and whilst CF is by far, the most
popular, the others can do the same tricks, they are usually smaller and more
expensive per megabyte of storage.  There are no PC-card slots on the 3000.

The (very) few cameras that use removable optical storage use either a small
CD-R disk or an LS-120 SuperDisk (or floppy disk.)  The former can be read in
virtually any newer CD-ROM whilst the latter can be read in any LS-120
SuperDisk drive.  I seriously doubt that the HP e3000 can read the CD-R
produced by that camera, but I am ready to be proven wrong on this.  I am just
about certain you cannot plug an LS-120 drive on the 3000.  I have never seen a
floppy disk on an HP 3000.

All this to say that as far as I know, the only way to get the images from a
digital camera to the HP e3000, will be to transfer them from the camera to a
Windows or Mac system and then transfer the files to the HP 3000, via Samba or
FTP or some other mechanism.  (if the camera comes with drivers for Linux, BeOS
or others, then that could be an alternative also.)

Once the images are on the 3000, you can elect to store them in the database as
blobs or store the filename containing the image in the database.  I would
recommend the latter, simply because there is currently no mechanism to easily
store a multimegabyte object in TurboIMAGE.  I would place the images in the
POSIX environment so as to make use of directories and sub-directories in order
to keep some semblance of order on the images.  These directories could easily
be accessible via Samba, greatly simplifying your task.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Chris [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Saturday, January 13, 2001 1:40 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Hooking a Digital Camera to HP3000

Hi everyone.

I'm looking into getting a digital camera attached to a HP3000 mainframe.
The idea is so we can store images of our clients on our database. Is there
a way this can be done, what equitment would I need, and how much do you
think it would cost to implament it.