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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.
It seems like they could have made the remote smaller or the buttons larger.
It's bad design. Other than that the camera seems really feature enhanced.
In a few months when the price drops it might be worth checking out.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Why?
There doesn't seem to be much value on putting a web page on a 2" screen.
And email? On a video camera? I think I'll pass, unless someone can come up with a really compelling reason that this truly is useful "convergence".
Although maybe the idea is that you can e-mail pictures and movies on the fly to people.
Hmm, I have to stop thinking while I'm typing.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I'd rather have better components and a cheaper price. Not crappy stuff jammed together, compromising other components and a higher price.
It might be a neat gadget for "all in one" but it's always going to be a compromise. Especially since things change so rapidly in technology.
I'll leave this one alone, just like the digital camera slash MP3 player... :-/
Where where?
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Someday soon, whether we like it or not, there will be a web-and-email chip made available. You install this single chip into any device with a screen and network hole, and you have a GUI-based web and email system ready to run.
THAT will be the killer app of the decade, because it allows literally hundreds of new pieces of technology for a fraction of the price. Not just web pads, and camcorders, but web-enabled microwaves, fridge fronts, cars, e-books, boats, watches, etc.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
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!
DV footage is about four megabytes per second. On a thirty gigabyte hard drive, you'd be able to store roughly 2.13 hours of DV footage. That's at a resolution of 720x480 at 29.97 frames per second...and at a cost that is quite a few times that of the equivalent tape storage.
Still want that hard drive camcorder?
And how many people who actually use the internet still use the phrase "i'm going to surf the net".
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
This isn't a new idea, but when are we going to stop calling things by one name? For instance, what makes this more of a digital camera, than a portable web client with video capture capabilities (aside from marketing)? When something can capture video, surf the net, send email, host a website, play videogames, and play mp3s, I call it a pc... I'm not saying that they should immediately switch naming schemes or anything, I'm just interested in where you guys think this is going. Where do you draw the line between a camera with extra features, and a pc with a camera?
p.s. I'm not saying that this particular "camera" can do all those things, I'm theorizing that it will be only a matter of time before they can.
Web-enabled cell phone service is a joke. There have been articles about it not catching on in the States. Now Sony thinks that we need both a web browser and an email client built in to the camcorder with a 2.5" LCD?
Sony has introduced the concepts of bloatware and feature creep into their camcorders. If I want to browse the Internet, I will use my home computer. I will not use my camcorder, my cell phone, my refridgerator, or anything other than my home computer.
Except for a web-enabled toilet. Attach a swing arm with an Internet Terminal to my toilet and that, my friends, will work. And nothing else.
Why's everyone making everything smaller? Nuts ta that. I wanna surf the net on the WALL IN MY ROOM. When's that gonna happen at an affordable cost?
Man, I wish I'd majored in EE with a focus on electronics and low level programming. I would love to create some of these devices.
Amen. Get me back down to the 40's!
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
Imagine being able to set all of the clocks in your house with a single command (better yet, have them use ntp). Program your VCR with a web interface. Your stereo too. How about phones that can broadcast callerid info to the network, and listening clients would then get it? Callerid info could then display on your computer, or on your TV screen when a call came in. HOw about temperature and light controls too? (yeah, that's more home automation, but if they just made everything use standard tcp/ip and run its own webserver, no problem.)
Ok, granted I'd never want to read /. on a camcorder, but I might want to e-mail a video I just made to my brother in Chicago. Maybe I could upload a video I made of Steve Balmer dancing around like an idiot to a humor website (ok, so someone already did that). All in all, this promises better ways to distribute images over the Internet than conventional means which typically require hooking up to a computer first.
In my mind, its better that they use web browsing and e-mail technology to achieve these things rather than implement something of their own design that wouldn't work with any existing tools.
And as soon as someone finds a security hole you're applying patches to your VCR, stereo, microwave, etc. What's that? Everything's in ROM? Well, I guees you'll just have to replace the chips. Meanwhile, some skript kiddie just reset your VCR so it only records Britney videos, your microwave to only run at half power, and your clocks are all on different time zones.
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I think Edison Carter of Network 23(on Max Headroom) would appreceate a camera like this.
Need to get a product hyped to geeks? Just take any random device, attach an LCD screen to it, and give it a webbrowser.
Stir, mix, wait a week and it'll be posted on Slashdot. Give it a month and you'll be able to buy it on thinkgeek.
Coming soon, a toaster that has an xterm!
An EmacsCorder.
324006
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
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
How fast do you think that wireless connection is really gonna be?
For anyone curious, AUSTRALIAN$4,400 is US$2,278-odd(*), which would buy you a really nice three-chip camcorder like a Sony TRV-900 or Canon GL1.
:-(.
If you're serious about high-quality images, this thing is clearly junk
D
(*) I closed the window a little too early, so I don't remember the amount to the dollar, but that's pretty close.
Yes yes, that's all well and good, but tell me this:
When can I finally get radio stations from a taco?
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Let me give you the lowdown
Maybe the piano would automatically digitize and MP3-encode everything you play. When you finish, you could push some button and it would email the piece to whoever you want. Or something like that.
Some folks hear about devices sending emails or surfing the net and wonder just who in the world would want to surf the web through a camcorder or digital camera or whatever. A lot of people I talk to think that features like these are unnecessary junk to make something look high-tech. Well, I think this particular camera is really cool because it has all these connectivity capabilities and the ability to surf the net. Web connectivity for a camera or whatever can actually be a very useful feature, if you stop to think about it for a moment. At our shop, we have a Sony digital camera that operates with a floppy disk. On many occasions, we take a picture of a work in progress and email it to the customer (or to an employee at one of the other plants). This involves finding a blank floppy, taking the required photo(s), finding a computer nobody's using right now, copying the files to the hard drive (well, that's optional I suppose), opening an email message, attaching the photo and finally emailing it to the recipient. Wouldn't it be much better if you could take the pictures and then (through some interface or other--I don't quite know how this works on this camera), put in the email address of the recipient, choose which photos to send, punch in a brief message and hit a 'send' button? No floppy, no computer, no nothing. Well, maybe it isn't THAT useful, but I think that in due time, many things like cameras will have these features and it won't be considered such a big deal that some device can send an email. And furthermore, people will wonder how the heck we ever survived without being able to send an email from the washing machine or whatever.
For a bunch of techies, there's not much imagination here. I can't get to the information on the Sony unit in question, but there are plenty of uses for a TCP/IP-enabled camera or camcorder.
Ricoh already sells a digital still camera with an IP stack, mail and FTP clients and a PC Card slot that will take a netowrk or modem card. Gimmicky? Nope. For surfing and checking your mail? Nope. What it lets you do is email or FTP images directly from the camera. If you're a traveling real-estate or newspaper photographer, what could be more immediate than that? No trip back to the hotel, no stopping at a service bureau--just connect to your data-enabled cellphone (or relay via Bluetooth! or a nearby 802.11b access point!) and send out that lo-res picture you just took.
Just because the US is still seemingly years away from 2.5G or 3G wireless data service, that doesn't mean Japan is. Hell, if Metricom hadn't called it a day, even that would be a compelling way to send out brief low-res clips.
Sure, we're a ways away from being able to transmit full-resolution DV over the net from a handheld camera, but that doesn't mean putting the functionality in now won't find an audience for the things it can do now.
Those videophones TV war reporters have been using during the past month in Afghanistan aren't hi-res or high-bandwidth either, but that didn't make them useless.
I've got a Ricoh camera that comes with similar capabilities - it can send email and do dialup. Part of its software sute is a dialin server that runs on your desktop so you can 'phone em in'.Its quite handy for some, absolutely useless is for others
If you're a journo and have get your photos back to a home office for processing or whatever, its easier to hav it all in one device than lugging around cameras, laptop and such just to get them sent 'home'.
Much easier to just phone home from the camera. Its convergence in a good way.
If you don't need the features, don't pay extra to buy them.