Using High-resolution Digital Still Cameras for Webcam

There has been much discussion of VM95 by Erdman Video Systems on another thread of this forum. It seems to be a great program, but is limited to certain Olympus cameras and just a few Kodak models.

I have found a number of other programs that offer similar features (control of a digital still camera by the PC) allowing the great photographic quality of these digital still cameras to be used as webcams.

While I have not reviewed them, the following links may be helpful for others searching for a program that works with their camera model:

Canon: “Cam4you remote”: http://www.math.ualberta.ca/imaging/
Olympus: “VM95” by Erdman Video Systems: [/b]http://www.video-monitoring.com/about_VM95.htm
Canon and Olympus: “Cam2Com” http://sabsik.com/Cam2Com/
Nikon Coolpix: “Remote Control Driver and GUI”: http://www.math.ualberta.ca/imaging/
Agfa, EPSON, Olympus, Sanyo: “Came” http://park2.wakwak.com/~tsuruzoh/index-e.html
Canon, HP, Kodak, Konica, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic Ricoh, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba (over 800 cameras using Linux): “gPhoto2” http://www.gphoto.org/

I’m sure there are others, so feel free to add to this list or report on what works or doesn’t.

After struggling with VM95 :(, I found the camera control program by Pine Tree computing (http://www.pinetreecomputing.com/camctl.asp) to be a very stable application for my Olympus C4000.
It has good control over the camera parameters, a built-in FTP client and a nice timelapse feature. For a resolution of 640x480 it’s free, for higher resolutions there’s a shareware fee ($24.99). Highly recommended :D.