Baron’s Blog

Left to right: Nikon Coolpix 4500, Canon PowerShot SD800IS, Sanyo Xacti HD2

I got a new camera and this time it’s a video camera that can also take photos, as opposed to a camera that can sometimes shoot video. As you can see from the photo above my new camera (on the far right) is larger than my most recent PowerShot but smaller than my old CoolPix (anyone want to buy a CoolPix or PowerShot?) This new camera can shoot High Definition 720P video onto SD memory cards. At the highest quality I can get about 30 minutes of HD video onto a 2GB card.

This is more of a teaser, not a real review which will come later somewhere after I write it. I will say this, Sanyo doesn’t know how to design lens caps as it keeps falling off and the battery compartment door came off by accident once already.

More tease? Click here for a pair of quick samples I have online, one is HD video the other is a jpeg image, both straight off the memory card.
You probably have to option-click on the MP4 filename if you’re on a Mac to download the big file or right-click if you’ve got a right mouse button and choose save for the file. About 22.8MB in file size for a 21 second HD video in mpeg-4. You’ll need a speedy processor and graphics card to play back the video smoothly. Yesterday’s blog photos were all shot with the Sanyo.

And there is an underwater housing for this little HDV Cam.

You know your life is going to suck for the next few hours when you insert your 4GB CF memory card into a reader and this shows up on the screen. Clicking on the card proceeded to freeze the laptop, subsequent attempts at mounting the card normally via USB reader (two different readers) and a PC Card adapter was futile.

I was out on location and happen to also have my own laptop with me so I ran Photo Rescue (which I highly recommend owning if you’re a photographer to analyze the card and recover the images from the un-readable card.

Laptop buckled-in, Photo Rescue running to recover images as I went back out to the location to shoot new images just in case the recovery attempt failed.

Shot my new images and inserted the wireless card for Verizon Wireless National Access and the laptop doesn’t recognize the card at all. I transmit one image via cellphone while rebooting the laptop, get the card to work then move two more images.

So things weren’t totally FUBAR, Photo Rescue ended up recovering all the images (about halfway back on the drive to the office). Photojournalism is often about problem solving and sometimes the problems you need to solve have nothing to do with taking photos.

So Apple finally unveiled the iPhone, or maybe it’s really called the Apple iPhone since they have that apple logo before the name on their site since Cisco (via Linksys) has an iPhone announced last month. One of the disappointments is that it doesn’t include iChat on the phone. I assume this is so Cingular, the iPhone carrier, won’t freak-out that people are making free calls via their Apple iPhone. After all, you’d want to cash in on SMS and long distance calls, something that would be easily done for free if iChat were on the device.

Do I want one? Not quite yet. It only has 8GB of memory, can’t IM, isn’t on Verizon Wireless, can’t data connect my laptop and I’m still locked into my current cellphone account anyway. My Treo 650 can do just about everything the iPhone can except WiFi and it doesn’t have that beautiful Apple interface built in.

Well, according to Reuters Cisco has decided to sue Apple for calling their phone the iPhone. I predict they’ll just call it the Apple Phone and put their logo before the word phone like they did for Apple TV.

Microsoft just released their Zune iPod killer player. But as usual they miss the mark. It’s like they’re sitting next to the smartest kid in the room during the SAT and cheating by looking at their answers but purposely answering some questions wrong to not get caught. I mean, if you’re gonna cheat then cheat. Even their Zune website looks un-cool and un-hip. They didn’t even get the domain zune.com either.

I think Microsoft is misguided in their most touted feature, sharing of your content with others in the room. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to waste my player’s battery by having everyone run the hard drive ragged playing tracks or videos. I suspect most people will leave theirs on private, especially if it takes a toll on battery life and/or makes their own audio skip while to cpu and music access gets overworked. And even if you’re listening to the same song you won’t be in sync with anyone else listening to the same song with their Zune without some tricky pause and starts. So it’s not like two people with Zunes can be dancing with each other listening to the same song in sync. Okay, maybe techno music might work since the way I understand it is that you have to search the person’s Zune for tunes, then download/buffer the tune into your own Zune. Plus everytime people want to share you need to stop everything and pair the network with them.

Steve Jobs, what you need to do is incorporate an FM transmitter/receiver into the next generation iPod. This will do three things:
1. People can transmit their audio to their car stereo, home stereo, anything that has an FM tuner.
2. People can listen to FM radio without buying that special FM tuner doggle for the iPod.
3. People will be able to share their iPod’s audio. This will be more of a killer app than Microsoft’s sharing. Imagine an iPod commercial where one person is playing music and everyone with an iPod close by is dancing in sync since they’ve tuned into that iPod’s audio. Or show some dude with a killer car stereo open their hatchback playing crappy music for people then a beautiful gal come by with her iPod who then sends music to the radio for some killer tunes…instant party. The gal becomes an instant DJ for the party.

The Zune’s screen, although bigger than the iPod screen, is the same resolution 320×240. And the Zune doesn’t work with the Mac.

Yawn…where’s my iPod?

I tried to take a photo with my Canon PowerShot s500 camera and this was the result. A funhouse mirror image except it ain’t so fun. Looks to me like the CCD chip inside the camera is broken or has worked loose somehow. My apologies to the cat.

Another shot, this time of something flat. Looks like the image is not just skewed but also electrically damaged.

Anyone care to guess what this is a photo of?

Looks like a new pocket camera is in my future. That Canon PowerShot SD800IS on the right looks mighty tempting. Also looks like maybe I’ll be selling my underwater housing for my s500 on Ebay.

And I had just shot that nice flower photo a couple of days ago with this little camera and it was working fine in this morning. Something jarred loose.

*UPDATE* Canon’s Asia website exactlly describe’s this problem as being a defective CCD. But my model isn’t included in the recall, in fact the recall isn’t for any cameras released in the USA. It’s a problem with humidty affecting the chip and we all know how humid Hawaii can be.

I can play the part of Sun Catcher at Home Maid Bakery where I ended up buying crispy manju on quake day. This is another Dawn photo, one day before the quake.

My latest camera aquisition from St. James Thrift Store. $5 for this puppy…sweet! I’ve got some future plans for this camera.

It’s funny in that I never got into 35mm photography while in high school, way too complicated with all that depth-of-field business and shutter speeds. So I had a Polaroid which allowed me to shoot a photo, chimp it, then take another if I didn’t like it. Kinda like how I do it now with digital.

Had to do some email today away from my computer. Although this combo seems perfect with fast wireless internet, a bluetooth wireless keyboard and email client it has one problem…me. I type too fast for the bluetooth keyboard to keep up so it drops letters and has some other glitches. If you’re thinking about getting one of these Palm keyboards I’d have to give it a thumbs-down, not ready for prime time yet.