Quality has always been the sticking point for me. I wasn't going to move from my 35mm film camera until I was certain that, if I captured a memory with a digital camera, I wouldn't think "Darn, I wish I had used my regular camera." Early consumer-grade digital cameras had difficulty with accurate color representation, and flash memory technology was too immature to allow for many high-resolution images to be captured on a single card.

In 1999, however, things changed. Kodak, considered by many to be the leader in both SLR and digital photography, released a new series of digital cameras that caught my attention. The DC-265 has impeccable capture quality, both in terms of resolution (1.6 million pixels, which is 1536 x 1024 resolution) and accurate color representation. A single 16MB CompactFlash (CF) card could hold 100+ images, and the price had fallen to a reasonable level. I took the plunge and purchased the DC-265 after reading many favorable reviews.

Choosing the right Windows CE device
In terms of hardware, the Clio is a great digital photography companion. With an internal CF card slot, and a PCMCIA card slot, it's simple to load the images. I also purchased a 48MB CF to be the main storage card for my camera. A card of this size would allow me to take anywhere from 96 to 560 photos, depending on the quality (i.e., the resolution of each image would determine the memory it would consume). An accessory kit purchased along with my camera provided me with an adapter that allowed me to plug the CF card into the Clio's PCMCIA card slot. I'm a person that relies heavily on being able to do things quickly, so opening the back panel of the Clio to insert the CF was out of the question. Lastly, the DC-265 camera supported multiple methods of connecting to the host, including USB, serial, and IrDA, so I was set.

Finding the software
I had the hardware in place, but I needed the silver bullet: software. Windows CE has no built-in image viewing software, and the newsgroups are rife with people who have problems viewing digital camera JPEG (i.e., Joint Photographic Expert Group format) images. The problem usually relates to the proprietary headers in the JPEG images that make it unreadable except with special software. So I would need a Windows CE software package that would give me the ability to work with my digital images. Enter Sierra Image Expert for Windows CE.