Surf the Net on a Digital Camcorder

Daniel Rutter writes "Sony's DCR-IP7 Network Handycam IP is digital. It's really small. And it's got a super-tiny one hour cassette, USB, i.LINK and Bluetooth connectivity, a Web browser, an e-mail client, and a quite long list of other features." Pricey, but interesting. The review kinda pans the device, but I still dig the idea.

Comments

Another source for DCR-IP7 info

[Tsar]

Looks like the story link is /.'ed. However, Digital Photography Review has this story with reams of specs and evaluation data. Read it whilst you can!

Re:Another source for DCR-IP7 info

[Daniel Rutter]

> Looks like the story link is /.'ed.

Yeah, yeah. Always happens. Bookmark the page (it only just went up, so there's no Google cache of it yet), come back later, spend the intervening time sending me money so I can afford a phatter server :-).

> However, Digital Photography Review has this
> story with reams of specs and evaluation data.

Um... actually, that just looks like the reformatted press release to me. Phil Askey's camera reviews are superb, I agree, but that isn't one. I think I might have written the first real review of this widget to hit the Web. I'm not betting anything on that, though :-).

To assuage all your poor Server Not Found souls, here's the text of the review's conclusion:

Who's this camera for?

Well, if you want a super-ultra-tiny camera, the DCR-IP7 is pretty much where it's at. But there are Mini DV cameras that aren't a great deal bigger. Sony's own DCR-PC9, for instance, weighs less than 500 grams. JVC's GR-DVP3U weighs 350 grams, and is inconsequentially larger than the DCR-IP7.

Mini DV cameras have better video quality than Micro MV, they're cheaper, they've all got i.LINK ports, and their i.LINK ports actually work with normal DV gear.

So if you just want a minuscule travel-cam, this probably isn't the product for you.

What if you really dig the idea of e-mail from your camera, for some reason?

If you simply must have that feature, then this is the camera for you. Well, this or its bigger cousin, the DCR-PC120.

But seeing as all you can do with this thing's "networking" is connect to a dial-up Internet account, I'm uncertain what use it is for the vast majority of users.

No way are you going to be sending your intrepidly collected reportage from the field to the newspaper office over a mobile phone dial-up connection, even if there aren't any attachment file size limits. And if you're travelling the world, I doubt you want to phone home at great expense in order to send people grainy low-res video clips of your adventures.

Frankly, I found the DCR-IP7 rather frustrating. Not because of usability issues, so much as missed opportunities. Here's this thing with FireWire and USB and Bluetooth, and (alleged) standard file format still and video input and output. And there just aren't enough simple elementary connections between those things. The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

You should be able to see this camera as a mass storage device via all three interfaces and just copy video from the tape without installing anything but a simple driver. You can't.

You should be able to use the camera as a Windows Video device. You can't.

Heck, you should be able to access the camera with a TWAIN driver. You can't.

And because the camera uses Micro MV, you can connect it via i.LINK/FireWire to a DV device if you like, but it won't bloody work. So everything's funnelled through MovieShaker. Which sucks.

Hey, Sony. Maybe MovieShaker is the talk of the town in Tokyo, or something, but would it kill you to put in an Expert Mode or something next time, and actually have six people test your software before you release it?

You wouldn't think it'd be that hard. Include basic functions. Verify actual operation of said basic functions. Then include happy smiling faces and integrated techno video clip generators, if you must.

If this camera cost a thousand Australian bucks, I'd cut it some slack, but it doesn't. It's stunningly expensive.

The next time I see a Sony device with "Network" and "IP" in its name, I want to be able to just plug it into freakin' Ethernet, OK? Include FireWire and Bluetooth and 802.11b and RS-232 and RFC 1217 if you want, but also put a simple RJ45 socket on the thing and give it a DHCP client and a basic HTTP interface. You can get those features in cheap and cheerful home Internet sharing boxes; I think you could manage to cram them into a camera.

I, for one, would love an instant home-LAN video server camera dingus, especially if it could work as an Internet image source as well, which it could, with that simple little Web server built in. Webcams that can do this exist already - they're expensive, but so's this camera.

Sony can make avant-garde bleeding-edge products that work really well. Their MVC-CD1000 digital still camera with its 77mm CD-R drive, for instance, is still almost as technologically impressive as it was when I reviewed it more than a year ago. But now you can buy new CD1000s for $US650 on eBay. That's half of the original list price.

If the MVC-IP7 can be had for a mere $AUD2250 or so in a year's time, it might be worth getting. Micro MV doesn't have annoyingly bad image quality, and there ought to be more Micro MV-aware software and hardware around in a year, so you won't be stuck with Pokemon-themed McSoftware when you want to edit stuff. Or artificially constrained by silly format barriers.

Right now, though, this camera's the video equivalent of a wild out-there impractical concept car that for some reason has made it into the dealerships. No sane person would want to drive it, but a fool and his money are welcome to try.

If I were you, though, I'd hand the DCR-IP7 back to the booth babe.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:one hour is more than enough for vacations

[edremy]

If anything, the problem with camcorders is that they let people take too much film. Who the hell can sit through 8 hours of vacation video footage? Even an hour could be dangerously close to boring you're audience to death.

Why do you think Apple is hyping iMovie?

iMovie is one damn nice product. Dead simple to use: it took me less than 20 minutes to figure out virtually everything. Can do almost anything a non-professional wants- crop the junk, reorder the good stuff, put nice titles and transitions between the pieces, layer a music track over the whole thing and then dump it back out to tape or to Quicktime.

I've got many hours of footage of my new baby: it's going to be cut down to about 15 minutes of the good stuff when I give tapes out to people who haven't been able to see him yet.

Eric