It turns out that the cable I use to connect my digital camera to my computer can also be used to recharge my Razr by using it to connect the phone to my laptop. So if that works, then how come Canon doesn't make it so that the Camera battery can be recharged this way as well? When traveling, it's always nice to minimize the number of discreet power items you need to take with you and risk losing.
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Better Gadgets Needed
20 Feb 2007 11:52 am
Comments (26)
Just the free market in action, optimizing our choices. Every device manufacturer agrees that it would be good to have only a few, agreed-upon standards for cables, batteries, and chargers. And every manufacturer agrees that it should be _their standard_, and that all the other manufacturers should pay them royalties on every unit shipped.
The result? The "free market" creates 8,983 different cables, and you not only get to pay through the nose for all of them you also have to carry them all, all the time.
Cranky
What Volts and Watts said. USB can power low-intensity devices, but a camera has a flash on it.
"discrete," Harvard boy.
Most annoying: somehow my blackberry can be charged by the power adaptor for my cell phone (KRZR), but the cell phone rejects the blackberry adaptor. Also: they are basically identical so easily confused.
Why I have both a blackberry and a cell phone is another topic entirely.
Maybe he meant "discreet," like a small vibrator or somethin'.
Discreet: 1. judicious in one's conduct or speech, esp. with regard to respecting privacy or maintaining silence about something of a delicate nature; prudent; circumspect.
2. showing prudence and circumspection; decorous: a discreet silence.
3. modestly unobtrusive; unostentatious: a discreet, finely wrought gold necklace.
Discrete: . apart or detached from others; separate; distinct: six discrete parts.
2. consisting of or characterized by distinct or individual parts; discontinuous.
3. Mathematics. a. (of a topology or topological space) having the property that every subset is an open set.
b. defined only for an isolated set of points: a discrete variable.
c. using only arithmetic and algebra; not involving calculus: discrete methods.
That is all.
Give credit to whomever figured out that data and power could be transmitted through the same wire. It wasn't long ago that you'd have one for each.
I recently got a signal booster for my cable tv that connects a transformer to the booster using a piece of coaxial cable rather than some power specific wiring.
I'm not sure I understand the low power argument regarding USB. If you left it plugged in long enough wouldn't it still charge or is there some minimum amount of power required to even begin the charging process.
I have a portable 2.5" hard drive that connects (and receives power) via USB 2.0 or Firewire -- surely that uses more power than it takes to casually charge a camera, yes? I mean, I don't see MY talking about using the camera while it's being powered via USB here, just charging it.
The wattage argument doesn't hold water for small consumer cameras. A USB port can source 2.5 watts. A typical small camera powered by 2 NiMH AA recharchables has a pack capacity of 6.5 watt hours. A 2.5W source can charge a 6.5Whr pack in about three hours. Stand alone AA fast chargers will beat this, but it's still a fairly respectable time. The only thing necessary to implement USB charging for 2xAA powered cameras is a simple charging circuit.
USB is not up to charging cameras that use 4xAAs (13Whr pack capacity) or professional grade equipment like the Canon EOS 1D (20Whr Li-ion pack).
"USB doesn't provide a whole lot of actual power. It's fine for phone batteries, but cameras use a lot of juice."
That's a bogus argument. Charging batteries doesn't take a lot of energy all at once.
A part of the unusual-cable situation is because some companies want one endpoint on their devices for space reasons that might plug into usb or firewire on the other end, requiring their own custom cable ends. Another one is, if you lose that cable you'll need to replace it with a very expensive vendor-only cable, rather than just use the other one you've got lying around.
This is turning into a big part of my device-purchasing decisions - if it doesn't charge over standard USB, I'm not interested.
This has been my complaint too. I need to lug around 3 wires just for my camera. Once you add in my phone and iPod you're looking at a pocket full of cords. More widely adopted standards would be nice.
And, sometimes you wonder if battery companies pay device makers to design stuff that quickly eats many of the most expensive batteries possible.
Wouldn't you love to see a company make an electronic device whose instruction book didn't try to make it sound like only their brand of alkaline battery was safe to use in the product? They might say, "Use any 2 quality AA batteries in this device." If you read that, you'd almost shout for joy, and be waiting in line for their next product release.
Maybe he meant "discreete".
That's a standard "micro-USB" cable, lots of people support it. Not people like Apple, mind you, but lots of people do.
I think the not-so-secret reason here is that they want you to shell out for a suspiciously overpriced Canon cable or dock.
My guess is because you'd need bulky electronics to up the voltage enough to charge the battery. To charge a 9v battery, you need more then 9v of juice. USB is, I think 5v? If that was the case, the camera would need to include a lot of electronics inside of it in order to process the electricity into a usable form.
Power bricks are large for a reason. Why would you want to carry around all the extra electronic components needed to charge a battery inside a tiny camera?
The Razr uses a 3.6V/600mAH battery; the Canon SD600 appears to use a 3.6V/790mAH battery. Either could be easily charged using a charging circuit powered by 5V USB, although it might not be super fast. As the Razr shows the charging circuit could be quite compact. The difference in capacity isn't enough to be significant except in charging time.
More likely reasons: (a) the feature adds small but significant expense. Cell phones are often effectively subsidized through monthly contracts; cameras have to turn all their profit on the initial sale. (b) charging a cell phone has to be done more frequently and is often more important when it has to happen, so having several possible ways to charge is a more important feature on the phone. (c) the charging circuit used in the phone might be more robust with respect to input voltage variations because people charge so many different ways using 3rd party chargers. Adding the USB capability might not have been quite as big a design modification. The idea on the camera is that you use the Canon charger and that's it. (c) Motorola's engineering tradition is in mobile communications and their spinoff Freescale makes the power regulator chips, so getting a design mod to easily take USB input is easier for them (d) Most likely of all: Canon simply hasn't got around to it yet.
Well, a similar question is: why doesn't canon include a bluetooth interface, so you don't need that cable in the first place! In the latest ixus I bought, it is a standard USB cable, which is better than the previous one and it's device specific cable. But still, I can download all the pictures and files I want from my Nokia N91 phone (with a fine resolution camera 2Mpixel, and 4 gig of memory on the phone, so potentially a lot of data) without a cable. But I need to lug around a cable or spare microflash memory cards if I take my digital camera.
Does your laptop have a PS2 port? No? I guess standardization does happen sometimes.
USB was developed by a consortium of companies and is radically superior to the gaggle of cables that existed before it. Whereas every device that connected to a computer once had its own port configuration, USB is now one of only 2 standards. Also, newer iterations of USB use the same port configuration, meaning that older cables will continue to work with new ports.
Free market did really well on this one.
Do any conspiracy-minded gadgeteers find it odd that so many of our data handling and reasonably personal devices (cell phones, cameras, USB disk drives) use data cables for charging? You know, the kind of cable you'd need to pipe purloined personal data to the power grid, whose digital data carrying capacity at least several companies have found great enough market products based on it? And so then shouldn't the noun form be discreetion?
Tinfoil Fedora,
That's an interesting theory, but most rechargers use DC power supplies run through a transformer. The big inducters in the transformers kill any data carrying capacity. The fact that they convert 60 Hz to DC means you couldn't even come close to 60 bits/second transmission.
Cedichou: Cameras don't have bluetooth because its too slow since it runs only at a nominal 1Mbit/s and really passes about 700kb/s. My experience is that the original USB at 12 Mb/s is often too slow if you make a lot of short movies on your camera. In fact, USB2 at 480Mb/s is what you need.
the mini-USB standard is a good start to a totally redesigned world in which there is one standard and one plug for DC power.
Have you actually tried charging the RAZR with a standard USB cable? My wife has a different model Motorola cell phone, not a RAZR. I falsely assumed it would charge via USB and failed to bring the charger on vacation. Then I tried charging it over USB and the battery simply would not charge.
Turns out Motorola wants you to pay for a special USB cable. I think it was $50. I called Motorola tech support and was told that it just wouldn't work with a standard USB cable. You needed their cable and their drivers. And of course you could not simply download the drivers and try it with a standard cable, you had to purchase the kit.
I have visions of some guy in Product Marketing decided they can get an extra $50 out of people with this feature. Just this little proprietary tweak, doesn't impact data transfer, but you will pay for this extra convenience. How much extra profit do we make ?
Except that customers remember this piddly crap the next time they buy a phone.
Comments closed March 06, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
USB doesn't provide a whole lot of actual power. It's fine for phone batteries, but cameras use a lot of juice.
Posted by Volts and Watts | February 20, 2007 12:10 PM