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Connecting an external camera to a cell phone

aerosam

Lurker
Jun 7, 2011
2
0
Hi Folks

I have a high resolution video camera.
I want to beam the videos from this camera through a 3G network to my laptop.
Is it possible to connect an external camera to a cell phone?
(I don't want to use the existing cell phone camera)
I don't mind ripping apart a good cell phone for this experiment.

Thanks
Sam
 
Is it possible to connect an external camera to a cell phone?

Absolutely not. Its a phone, not a computer. It doesnt have host support to host the usb device. It doesnt have drivers for any devices. And it doesnt have any video inputs.

The only two phones/tablets that can do this are the Atrix and the Xoom. But even those are VERY limited to what they can accept, mostly just keyboards, controllers, and usb drives.
 
Upvote 0
Hi Folks

I have a high resolution video camera.
I want to beam the videos from this camera through a 3G network to my laptop.
Is it possible to connect an external camera to a cell phone?
(I don't want to use the existing cell phone camera)
I don't mind ripping apart a good cell phone for this experiment.

Thanks
Sam

So you take HD video with your camera, and want to watch said videos on your laptop? Why would you not just connect your camera to the laptop
 
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Absolutely not. Its a phone, not a computer. It doesnt have host support to host the usb device. It doesnt have drivers for any devices. And it doesnt have any video inputs.

The only two phones/tablets that can do this are the Atrix and the Xoom. But even those are VERY limited to what they can accept, mostly just keyboards, controllers, and usb drives.

aren't Google adding hosting in 3.1? so any tablet with 3.1
 
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Not the most elegant solution, but the net results can be the same if your camera uses SD cards. Get a MicroSD card and adapter for your camera. Take your pics, and then move the memory card from the camera to the phone. From there you can use Dropbox to copy the files from your phone to your laptop.
 
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forget about the mobile phone. What you need is a 3G IP board that takes analog video input and convert it to IP and then transmit the video to your laptop. depending on what SIM you use, (that means if the SIM will give you a fixed IP on 3G network), you can either access the video via a web interface (the IP board would have a built in interface), or there will be a software that you can use to receive the video from the IP board ( in this case you laptop has to have a public IP).
Hope this helps.
 
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There is a way for a mobile device to be a USB host, it is refereed to as USB on the go (OTG). This would enable you to read an external mass storage device such as various forms of flash RAM. So, you could read the flash RAM from the camera if it were plugged onto the phones USB or maybe even read the camera directly.

This standard is being pushed for Android tablet PC, but is currently available on the Samsung Galaxy S2 phone. This the only phone I know of that has this feature, but it maybe available on other phones.
 
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