Is there any danger to the camera using remote control?

Not that we are aware of! The DigiSnaps have been used thousands of times without incident.

There used to be some warnings posted from camera manufacturer rep’s about using remote control. There is a slight danger if you start poking into the various registers of the camera. There are commands to calibrate the camera, change some internal settings, and even upgrade the firmware. The old adage ‘a little knowledge can be dangerous’ can certainly apply here. Harbortronics has NDA’s in place with multiple camera manufacturers who have provided us with their camera model’s serial protocol, so we are in no danger of somehow accidentally upsetting camera calibrations.

We have on many many occasions during development testing actually caused cameras to lock-up (no longer responsive to anything). The communication process is fairly well defined, but it’s easy enough to confuse the camera. In most cases turning the camera off resolved the lock-up. Sometimes we had to open the battery compartment for a moment. We’ve never encountered or even heard of any case where a camera was damaged or even altered in any way through a remote command.

FYI: (Message from a customer:)

"Not a complaint, just a suggestion for your (otherwise) excellent product: Just got my DigiSnap 2000 - lots of fun, played with it in the office for a few hours, then decided to have my Nikon Coolpix 990 do an time-lapse of a shot every 3 minutes of the street in front of my office. After 6 hours of accrued footage was shot, I assembled it into a video, and watched an amazing, hi-resolution movie of action outside of our office: kids playing in the park next door; traffic up and down the street; clouds shooting across the sky; the setting sun.....Ah, the setting sun. After the sun went down in the video, I noticed a pink streak across the sky - must've been an aircraft or something... NOPE! I had inadvertently BURNED the CCD IMAGER in my camera whenever the sun poked out from behind the clouds! EVERY image I now shoot has this smear. Of course, in retrospect I should've forecast this occurrence. A regular 35mm camera has a shutter that protects the film surface from the pin-point focused image of the sun - not so for a digital camera! It simple had to endure the traveling "burn" point across the imager element. So I have my Nikon in for service right now - no idea what the repair expense will be. One of my next projects is to set up a servo & vane "shutter" mechanism that'll interface with the Digisnap so my camera lens will only have to "see" the sun only when absolutely necessary. PLEASE - put an 'Exposure to Sun during Time-lapse' warning on your website. If you had, I'm sure I would've taken better care on my 1st time-lapse test."