A quick look at the Agfa e307

I bought an Agfa e307 digital color camera in November 1998, when the price finally dropped to $149 at CompUSA.  I like the camera and the Adobe PhotoDeluxe software that came with it, but absolutely hate the PhotoWise software that also came with it.  In order...

The e307 is a no-frills, and I mean no frills color camera.  Fixed lens, no LCD viewfinder, memory fixed at 2M, none of the bells and whistles of the more expensive cameras.  But the 24-bit color picture quality is excellent, and its max resolution of 640 by 480 is plenty good enough for the 'bot pictures I want to take.  It hooks to your PC via a serial cable (supplied) and even works with the Mac.

Adobe PhotoDeluxe is an excellent utility that converts the e307 JPEG files into a proprietary format and lets you edit them until you can't stand it anymore.  You can then save these edited images back in the PhotoDeluxe format (.PDD) or export them as pure graphics images in any of several formats, including JPEG.  I could do without the big banners in the screen, which take up valuable editing room, but that's about my only complaint, and it certainly isn't a stopper.

Agfa's PhotoWise v1.06 stinks on ice.  The first nasty thing the program does is change your associations so it is the viewer for all JPEG files.  Arrogance aside, it's a pretty lousy viewer, certainly not in the same league as PhotoDeluxe.  What's worse, each time you change the association, then invoke PW, it changes the association back again!  I found a fix in the Agfa newsgroup and got my viewer aimed at PhotoDeluxe, but that wasted a lot of time, and it was only the beginning.

Next up, PW seems to assume that the camera will always be ready and running perfectly, a very bad assumption at any time and an unpardonable one when the PC and the camera are talking at >100 Kbaud.  Whenever the two miscommunicate, PW seizes up and absolutely will not unlock.  What's worse, it locks up the rest of your machine as well; you have to do the EndTask thingy and kill off PW before you can continue.  I have discovered that I can reset the communications by momentarily turning the camera off (close the front cover), then turning it back on again, but that's SO LAME.  I'm still working on a liveable fix for this one...

And even worse, PW is constantly talking to the camera, even when you're doing something that shouldn't be camera-related, so your odds of getting locked up are very high.  After six hours of use, I've only had one short download session where I managed to get in, do the download, and get back out before PW froze.

All told, I'm still glad I bought the camera, and I'm really enjoying the picture-taking.  But Lordy, I'm sick of using Agfa's lousy excuse for an app.  And the people who wrote this piece of junk actually signed their names to it!  Go figure...

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