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Category: Cameras

Sony NEX-VG10 interchangeable lense high-end consumer camcorder

Posted by Charbax – September 5, 2010 – View Comments

Sony is releasing this new camcorder with a big DSLR-style sensor for high image quality and with support for interchangeable lenses from the Sony NEX series as well as supporting the Sony Alpha series lenses using an adaptor.

Sony Bloggie MHS-TS20K at IFA 2010

Posted by Charbax – September 5, 2010 – View Comments

This video was filmed using the Sony Bloggie MHS-TS20K at 1080p 30fps quality. It comes with auto-focus only, choice of 720p 60fps and 720p 30fps qualities as well. 3″ capacitive LCD touch screen with accelerometer, no SD card memory expansion, it uses the 8GB built-in storage only and no external microphone support, no built-in WiFi, it uploads only with a Windows/Mac software which also requires “importing” and alternative UI design to view thumbnails of video and images on the device.

Here is the full 1080p 30fps sample file of this video, download it from my Google Docs

Here’s another video recording sample with this camera at 720p 60fps: Download it from Google Docs

And a sample at 720p 30fps: Download it from Google Docs

$25 EKEN D1 pocket camcorder

Posted by Charbax – September 3, 2010 – View Comments

A pretty cheap D1 resolution, Flip-style camcorder. It can be ordered for about $25 each when ordering a thousand pieces.

ViewSonic 3D Camcorder

Posted by Charbax – September 3, 2010 – View Comments

Here’s a low cost 3D camcorder with a 3D auto-stereoscopic viewfinder display. The camcorder has a built-in HDMI output to output the resulting 720p 3D video to a 3D enabled HDTV. The resulting video can also be converted on a computer to the Youtube 3D video format before uploading.

DigiLife Camera Projector DDV-JF1

Posted by Charbax – June 3, 2010 – View Comments

A good looking, perfectly pocketable, digital camcorder combined with a projector that will cost between 220 and 250 US$.

Bluetooth-enabled JVC Everio GZ-HM550 released for $800

Posted by Charbax – March 19, 2010 – View Comments

Slowly seeing some of the wireless features I want in my next camcorder as I wrote in my Next Camcorder Wish-List, the new JVC Everio GZ-HM550 ads a few interesting Bluetooth features:

Source: JVC America Press release

1. Bluetooth for a Headset to monitor audio or record voice.
This is cool, but:
- How is the voice recording quality using any regular Bluetooth headset compared to high quality wireless RF microphones?
- Why can’t they sell us maximum quality non-interfering Bluetooth stereo microphones and have at least 2 work for recordings? I’d buy those wireless Bluetooth microphones for $50 each, I wish they would work in high quality and be easy to use. Good quality RF microphones are ridiculously expensive at something like $500 each (tell me in comments if you can recommend some cheaper best ones)

2. Bluetooth remote control and viewfinder on smartphones
3. Bluetooth GPS location (why not include GPS inside the camera? Would that add too much cost or power consumption?)
4. Bluetooth off-loading pictures to the smartphone, this is probably going to be very slow.

Dear Camcorder industry:
- Please add WiFi to upload directly to Youtube the HD recordings.
- Please let Bluetooth keyboards be used to edit Title, Description and Tags when uploading the videos to Youtube.
- Please provide high quality wireless microphones either RF or Bluetooth available for $50 per microphone and at least two shall work at the same time, with easy to use mixer volume control on the camcorder for all the mics.
- Please provide video-recording at very high quality yet low bitrates. Like using the OMAP4 processor from Texas Instruments, which promises to record real-time at close to 2% of desktop multi-pass insane encoding quality, thus reaching pretty perfect 720p as low as 2mbit/s and 1080p a bit higher than 4mbit/s (same bitrates as on Youtube HD). 720p 4mbit/s and 1080p 8mbit/s would be fine to then have Youtube compress to 2mbit/s and 4mbit/s.
- Please provide a processor like OMAP4 to record both 1080p optimized bitrate and D1 for streaming on ustream.tv (and display overlay chat) over Bluetooth Tethering, WiFi or built-in 3G at the same time.

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ARMflix: ARM interviews Texas Instruments at Mobile World Congress 2010

Posted by Charbax – March 13, 2010 – View Comments

ARM talks to Robert Tolbert, Director of Product Management at Texas Instruments at Mobile World Congress about their latest OMAP 4 platform showcasing multiple display capabilities.

You can also see my video interview and product showcase that I filmed at MWC at: http://armdevices.net/2010/02/16/texas-instruments-omap4-demonstrations/

This video was released at ARM’s official Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/ARMflix

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Aiptek PocketCinema Z20 720p camcorder and projector combo

Posted by Charbax – March 2, 2010 – View Comments

Here’s probably one of the first 720p camcorders with a built-in projector. With this you can take some cool videos and project them directly on any white wall to show friends and family, pretty cool.

Aiptek 3D camera and 3D screen

Posted by Charbax – March 2, 2010 – View Comments

Aiptek is showing probably one of the cheapest 3D camcorders on the market so far. It films 3D at VGA resolution, to then watch on any TV using polarized auto-shutter 3D glasses (or however they are called).

Update on my wishlist for my next HD camcorder

Posted by Charbax – January 31, 2010 – View Comments

Here’s an update on my August 2nd 2008 wish-list for features of my next HD Camcorder:

Since the beginning of 2008, I have been using my Sanyo HD1000 camcorder to post about 1000 videos in 9mbit/s 720p HD quality (h264 baseline Sanyo recordings) to Youtube and before mid-2008 using 3.5mbit/s DivX 720p HD to my server when I posted all my technology videos at http://techvideoblog.com. In 2005-2007, I was using my old Sony HDR-HC1 for my 1080i HDV recordings to video-blog in 3.5mbit/s DivX 720p and Google Video.

I consider myself to be a professional video-blogger, thus I really would like to see the HD camcorder industry to include video-blogger features in next generation camcorders.

I would like to see Sanyo release a compact pocketable HD3000 model in the next couple of months, with following features:

- built-in WiFi upload to Youtube HD, like the Eye-Fi but WiFi uploads should be fast at full WiFi speed with resume of uploads supported and very easy to use user interface in the camera to manage uploads and automatic-uploads.
- built-in Android touch screen interface (for editing titles/descriptions), with USB-host or Bluetooth for keyboard text input to edit titles/descriptions
- faster/better H264 encoding quality per bitrate with more lower bitrate options such as 4mbit/s 720p (which should be at least as good quality as 9mbit/s encoding on the older Sanyo HD1000) for quicker upload to Youtube.
- Wireless microphone using Bluetooth or RF built-in would be nice as well.
- Live WiFi streaming with overlay chat API for Qik/Ustream would be nice as well while it also records HD versions.
- If possible, it should record both 4mbit/s 720p or 1080p 8mbit/s for Youtube and 20mbit/s 1080p for archiving.
- It should support automatic editing of intro/outros in all videos. Thus I could record a new intro/outro for each new event and it should just automatically edit that in.
- Let me pause recordings to thus edit videos while I film and let me join/cut videos within the camcorder faster than on HD1000
- It should let me point to a transparent PNG file to use as Watermark in all videos by default, the Watermark should be applied while filming thus not loosing any quality in re-encoding later.
- Version with built-in SIM card slot for HSDPA features would be nice, constant overlay live IRC chat would be nice to receive live questions and suggestions from live viewers
- 4.3″ or 4.8″ screen would be nice as viewfinder compared to the 2.7″ of the HD1000.
- Built-in 2.5″ or 1.8″ hard drive compartment would be nice for adding built-in storage upwards 500GB.
- Otherwise a second built-in SDHC card slot would be nice.
- Some clever system to swap battery while filming without having to interrupt the filming would be impressive.
- Built-in wide-angle, I film everything in wide-angle so I’d rather not have to buy an add-on wide-angle lense. Yet it’s ok if Sanyo make the lense look wide an cool by default (small lenses don’t look as professional).

Dear Camcorder industry, if you want to differentiate your HD Camcorder with good optics (better than a basic Flip camcorder), and not let Smartphones get HD camcorder functions built-in before we see some of these things. These features are it! Once you have got these features integrated, you can start aiming towards Quad-HD resolution recording for cheap if the HDTV LCD industry can follow as well, instead of making those ridiculous 3D HDTV.

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