Dave, congratulations, what you have there is the closest thing I've found to a standard in camera USB connectors. It appears on at least TWO brands of cameras, namely Panasonic, and Nikon. At least Nikon's point and shoots, don't know about their DSLRs. Panasonic and Nikon share the same factory? :p
(Yes, this is the same connector as in iloveelectronics's post.)
And no, "digital" doesn't mean HDMI. It simply means USB. The only AV signals coming out of that connector are analog audio and composite video. My Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS2, which was my first digital camera, has this connector and was released in 2006, which means it predates the release of micro-USB by a year. And to be precise, this camera doesn't use the USB logo anywhere on its case, on the cable plugs, in the camera's user interface, or in the manual. This makes me think that maybe there was something (that connector?
) that was not USB compliant which forced them to leave out the logo, and maybe also use the word "digital" instead of USB on the case.
I don't mind this connector per se. At least it actually fills a purpose (or did back when composite was the preferred video standard anyway.) Having three RCA sockets (composite+stereo audio) on a compact camera would be unthinkably large, so might as well integrate it into another port. If only the manufacturers would have gotten their act together and standardized on a single connector for the purpose!
I have a Sony camera (Don't remember the model off the top of my head) with a micro USB connector and internal battery charger and everything, but it won't charge with any cable but the Sony one. It gives an error about a non genuine cable when I try to use any other.
Sony...
I have a few questions about that. How many different ones have you tried? Are you talking about a cable or a wall charger with a micro USB on the end? If you're talking about a cable, is this a data cable or a cheap-arse "charge only" cable with only two wires in it? Are you sure that this message means what it's saying? I could totally believe that Sony and their likes would display such a self-righteous message if, say, the cable has a too high voltage drop, or it's missing the otherwise common resistors used to present two constant voltages on the data line in order to indicate the charge current that a charger supports.
Dave makes in-camera charging sound like big feature. I thought it was pretty common.
Nope, the majority of cameras I looked at do not charge in-camera.
Just to be clear, does this refer to cameras that use AA batteries or similar, or system cameras with chunkier batteries and an external charger? In the former case, well that's just cheap crap where the batteries are the least of the reasons for avoiding them. In the latter case I can understand not wanting to be limited be the current limit of USB, if the battery has any significant capacity.