Although this article isn't a software review, Sierra Image Expert for Windows CE is the only software of its type for Windows CE. It deserves a close look, because it's essentially the only way to do the Windows CE/digital photography tango. Installation was a breeze. It takes up somewhere around 600k of space (and can be installed on a CF card).

Once installed, I attempted to see how I could communicate with the camera from my Clio. The most obvious method was to remove the CF card from the camera, but I wanted to push the envelope a little. Although Sierra Image Expert for Windows CE supports direct serial connections to cameras, I couldn't get it to work with the DC265 camera. I tried every speed option, from 19,200 up to 115,000, but none connected. According to the help files, the DC series is supported, so I'm not sure what happened.

Instead, I opted for popping the CF card into the PCMCIA adapter and browsing the images via Sierra Image Expert for Windows CE. This proved to be a fairly disappointing experience because of one thing: speed. The images taken were 300-450k in size, and it took the Clio nearly two seconds to draw each thumbnail. Multiply that by 50 images, and you're staring at a screen for quite some time.

This is a limitation of how fast the Clio can read data off the CF card, however, not a limitation of Sierra Image Expert. However, after you've double-clicked on an image and previewed the big version (which you can then decide to delete, etc.) you are taken back to the thumbnail screen where you have to wait for them to be generated yet again. After doing this a few times, the slowness became unbearable. The software would be far more effective if it would let you stay in the zoomed mode, shown in Figure A, and display a blank frame instead of forcing you back to the browse mode. I ended up previewing and deleting most of the images directly on my camera where the thumbnail image was drawn instantly. However, Sierra Image Expert is useful for other things as well.

FIGURE A

Here's the zoomed mode, showing both a full picture and other thumbnail images. Click picture for a larger image.

A powerful feature of this software is the ability to create albums of images. You can organize images into collections and folders to manage them easier. There's also a slide show feature, and even an option to create a shortcut on the desktop or Start menu. This sort of time-saver is a nice thought! The slide shows can be configured to automatically advance on a timer and, it appears, the signal can be pumped out to a VGA card, which in turn can be hooked up to a TV or LCD projector, depending on the card you chose. It would have been nice to be able to eliminate the control bar that is still visible in the slide show mode, but it's fairly unobtrusive.

Emailing your images
A surprisingly powerful (and secret) tool is the transfer tool. You can email the photo or transfer it via infrared directly from within the program, as shown in Figure B!

FIGURE B

You can email the photo or transfer it via infrared directly from within the program. Click picture for a larger image.