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CD-R In A Digital Camera: The Ueber-Mavica?
"(Now, Sony's announced (OK, preannounced) a new model with a 77mm CD-R drive built in. Several of the digicam sites have picked up on this. Imaging Resource seems to have gotten their hands on a demo unit first, has a bunch of pictures and product shots posted (they're who called it an "Uber Mavica"). Steve of Steve's Digicams is promising a "First Look" later today or tomorrow. Watch his news page for when he posts his take on it. This looks like a big deal in digicamland, because it extends the "no brainer" Mavica appeal into the multi-megapixel world, and eliminates the image-quality penalty in the process. (Of course, true Nerds may choose to wait another year or so until the digicams arrive built around the tiny 500MB micro-optical disks...)"
I'm excited to see a product which may spur sales (and availability!) of 77mm CD-R media, which when last I checked at Recorded Media Supply were available only in fairly large quantities (hundred lots) and cost considerably more than their bigger cousins. But they're so neat! Wanna split an order? ;)
Unfortunately, those cameras cost about $1000, and you still get crappy battery life.
Get a set of 1600 mAH NiMH rechargeable batteries, minimize your use of the LCD screen (if possible), and you'll get reasonable battery life. With my Kodak DC290, I can take enough high-resolution photos to fill my 64MB CF card (about 100 photos at 1792x1200) using a freshly charged set of NiMH AA cells. I've also run some extremely long time-lapse photos on a single set of batteries: one low-res photo per minute for 5 hours.
I'm not saying that digicams don't suck power -- just that it's a manageable problem.
--jim
Score:5???
Here's an idea: Read the article, realize that they even tried smacking the thing while shooting photos and were unable to prevent it from writing, post something more informed on Slashdot. Just a thought.
Neo-Luddite? Please. I bought my Mavica because of one overwhelming reason: floppies are highest common denomitor of computer storage media.
I just sold my Amiga. While it was extremely customized and very high-end, there's no way I could expect to use another digicam's proprietary interface with my system. Now, at home, I use Linux and FreeBSD. When I fill a disk, I can pop it into any of my servers or workstations, and instantly view my pictures. No moving weird cables around, no fiddling with arcane drivers, no praying that the manufacturer has actually heard of Unix... I get to concentrate on the content, rather than the media.
That, to me, is important. While I'm perfectly happy at hacking a microcontroller into a toaster, why should I have to screw around just to take a snapshot of my baby? Even more to the point, why should my wife? She's not a neo-Luddite either, but I'm glad that I don't have to teach her about advanced interfacing just so she can look at the pictures she took of her garden.
Finally, floppies make great "film". If I drag a 10-pack with me, I'm guaranteed to have more storage than interest in taking enough pictures to fill it. Furthermore, I'm not always in major metropolitan areas. If I run out of "film", I can grab another 10-pack at the nearest Wal-Mart. Where am I going to get memory cards, or possibly even CD-Rs in a town of 5000?
No, I bought my Mavica because I liked the freedom and flexibility that it offered. I had the money to buy any digicam I wanted, and the technical expertise to hack any of them to work on my systems. However, sometimes it's nice to have something that just works without hours and hours spent.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, there may have been several reasons for this. First, almost all computers sold have CD-ROM drives in them. I haven't seen a single puter with a minidisc-rom (MD-ROM?) drive. Second, if there's no data spec for the MD's, and no real way to implement it--i.e. no "data type field"--then they shouldn't put data on there.
Of course, my main concern for these things is the CD-R's susceptibility to vibration, and latency for the bloody things. Digital Photography Review had a review of the latest Mavica, and they reported a latency of 15 seconds, per picture after the exposure for the bloody things, when using a flash card. Granted, it's much better while using a floppy, but still, a floppy drive or a CD-R drive aren't the fastest of media these days. That's fine and dandy for portraits and other stills, but for anything else, it makes it kind of obnoxious, if not downright useless, relegating it to the "toys" section.
Nah... who needs battery life?
Reminds me of an old joke about a Russian gentleman with a suitcase, talking to an American tourist. The gist of the joke was that though it was a nice watch, it needed a battery the size of a suitcase. A Lithium-Ion battery is probably a requirement for these beasties, and by the time you have a charger, why not make it a cradle?
seanmeister
Nah... who needs battery life?
31 shots on my Kodak DC-215 wiped a set of Duracells - and everything on that is solid-state except the zoom bit.
Besides, isn't it curious that they'd push CDR over Minidisc?
Just my 2...
Battery life in digital cameras is bad enough as is - let alone how it'll get worse with mechanical equipment like a CD-R (even a small one). You have to spin the motor, operate the servos, and fire the laser in order to write. Combined with everything else (the LCD's suck power too, and so to the CCD's), I really don't see the future of digital photography including floppies or CD's much longer - even the optimized drives like the IBM Microdrives or the Iomega Clik are going to suck more power than flash.
Right now, digital photography is in a flux state anyhow. At the high end, it's been adequate for years (my old company was shooting production ads with digital medium-format backs like the Leaf back 6+ years ago), but the low end is just arriving at the point now where the quality equals what you can get from consumer-grade film.
Unfortunately, those cameras cost about $1000, and you still get crappy battery life.
Digital photography has really taken off the last couple of years, but I won't replace my trusty Nikon until I can buy a 3K x 2K pixel camera with 3x optical zoom, lens switching capability, USB and CF support, and enough battery life to take 150-200 photos on a charge (with flash as needed) for about $500. The feature set is out there today at twice that price. Until then, I'll continue to schlep my handy Apple QuickTake 200 (with 5v Smartmedia) to parties as my only digital device.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Not really... true Nerds, like Andy Ihnatko, have been taking digital pictures of everything in their line of sight, and writing about it, for years. With better cameras than the Sony, too.
Not many Wintel and Linux people read Ihnatko's stuff, because the old saw, "Macs are for graphics" is often wrongly correlated to "graphics are for Macs"... but his stuff is worth reading if you are interested in this stuff, no matter what platform you use.
Amid his humorous Mac-centric rants, you can find some darn good advice about digital photography (and other gadget lore).
As for Sony using CDR's? Well, every innovation drives down the cost of earlier iterations of any given gadget, meaning that this might make the camera I actually want a little bit cheaper. Even if I don't want the Sony, this is good news to me. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If you read the review, you'd see that it has a 'steady-shot' system that Sony have been putting in their camcorders for years (works very well in my Hi8).
You would also note the interesting discussion about finalising, what it takes and how to get around it - you can hook up a USB cable and take images off the unfinlaised disc for example.
I wish people would read the articles before posting (and the getting modded up?)
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Don't get me wrong, I love it to death, but here are a few critiques:
Now, it's a good product, but they have ignored some things that could make it a truly great product. First, scrap this business of having to hold it at arms length and look at the video screen. The screen is nice for previewing pictures, but I would rather look through a viewfinder.
Mount the viewfinder so that the camera would be turned 90 degrees towards you when shooting, with respect to the way it is held now. (my ascii art sucks, so I hope I am conveying this clearly). In that position, you would be holding the floppy unit "flat". I think that would be much more natural.
Also, as I look at the newer model Mavicas, I see that they have added a lot of features like sound, MPEG movie mode, etc. Big mistake!!! The whole point of having a Digicam is to take stills. If I wanted a camcorder, I would have bought one. All the effort they spend engineering those features is a big WASTE!!! If I were in charge of the Mavica design, I would strip any feature that didn't have to do with taking excellent still pictures, and plunge any savings into making the CCD larger. Pixelation is what keeps digicams from being a perfect replacement for film cameras. Eliminate visible pixelation, and you've got yourself a killer product.
Here's hoping Sony people read /.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here's some instructions for you:
First root yourself, then:
tail -f /var/log/messages&
put the compact flash in the adapter, put the adapter in your pcmcia slot, when you do this, you'll get a line or two tell you which drive device it has been assigned to (assuming pcmcia is set up right).
Supposing it's hdc, then do this:
mount -t vfat /dev/hdc1 /mnt/flash
cd into /mnt/flash and there's your pix. Enjoy. Don't forget to unmount before ejecting.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
First, how will it deal with shaking? Hopefully, well.
This is discussed in the article. They whacked on the camera pretty good during write, and it didn't fail.
Second, will you have to finish the CD and nullify the oportunity to write more data to it in order to get the pictures off?
This is discussed in the article. The disc must be finalized before it can be read anywhere but in the camera, but the camera also has USB so you can transfer images out that way.
Third, will it be generic CD-R's, or it gonna be a "memory stick" at the last minute, totally proprietary, and useless in anything buy a sony product.
This, too, is discussed in the article, which you obviously didn't take the time to read before posting. It uses standard 77mm CD-R media, which can be read in just about any CD-ROM drive.
Please, people, take the time to read the article. And moderators, why do you up-moderate posts by people who haven't even bothered to familiarize themselves with the source material? Those are good questions, but they're answered by just doing a little reading.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wonder why we haven't also heard about video camcorders with build in DVD-RAM to record video in realtime to a DVD disc which you could replay on a standard DVD player and easily make high quality copies to send your friends and relatives?
Oh yeah, It's because the DVD recording format and in fact almost the entire industry is under the tightly held control of a few elite greedy corporations who aren't interested in what the consumers want. That's right isn't it, I forgot.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Well, having been a nerd for more years than a lot of slashdot readers have been alive, I have to disagree.
I do a lot of web design and I can tell you I wouldn't have many visitors to my sites if I sprinkled "multiple 6 MB images" throughout. The 640x480 resolution of my Mavica FD-71 is more than adequate for web images, and the amazing zoom is well worth the lesser resolution. The advantage of the floppy disk is certainly there, but it's not the only one.
My wife is not a nerd, but the floppy disk functionality means she can take a picture, then load it right into whichever Mac her student is using at the time. We don't have to worry about having cables for each computer, or loading software on each one, when their small hard drives are already overflowing. (Schools rarely have the latest and greatest, and while she spent about $3K on school supplies (not including computers), she doesn't get paid enough to be buying new computers for her classroom.)
So yes, when everyone has super-high-resolution monitors (more than 72dpi), and photo-printer output is not fiendishly expensive, high-resolution digital cameras will be more important. For now, however, unless you are a professional in the (print) design world, a good old Mavica should be just fine.
One last anecdote: Not long after we got the Mavica, my wife's grandmother had her 93rd birthday party. Naturally, we brought the camera. A little over a week later she passed away. We ran out and bought a new printer (cheapie Epson color inkjet -- <$200 at Price Club) and printed out one of the pictures we had taken. We put it in a frame and put it out at the funeral. Most people didn't realize that it wasn't a photograph until they got up close to it.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.