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Sony Vaio GT3/K: You Spilled Your Laptop on my Camcorder
Anonymous Howard writes "This article talks about Sony's new, limited production Vaio GT3/K. It's a mixture of laptop and full fledged camcorder that uses the Transmeta 600mhz Crusuoe chip. Weighing in at 2.4 lbs, this hybrid has an amazing battery life of up to 17 hours, 30 GB drive, ATI Rage Mobility-M1 and 128 MB of RAM, and a swiveling screen.
This is definately a very unique device, one that completely blows away Sony's previous attempts of the laptop/video combination machines, mainly due the fact that the video camera is not a wimpy little video lense, but an actual full fledged digital camcorder."
They did sell this, it is a very old model in Japan and has been on and off ebay for almost a year.
Actually, Dynamism has had this listed for about a year now:
http://www.dynamism.com/gt3/index.shtml
Sig!
This thing has been out for over a year and this form factor has been out since 2001.
--- I do not moderate.
This type of model is in the market in Japan for more than 2 years.
I use one of these but is more a Camera Toy than a real laptop the keyboard is almost unusable. The battery life is not so good. and the screen is very tiny. But the movies it takes are clear and you can use the optical zoom.
Might? They want $2500 for a slimline PC & LCD with a 1.8ghz & 80gigs.
think that speaks for itself
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Wow, I've heard of being late slashdot, but dynamism has been carrying this thing for as long as I can remember.
"Sony says they had no intention of releasing this prototype computer/camera for general sale. That is, until the flood of interest at PC Expo 2000 Tokyo. It was quite a show for the GT3/K; whether a brilliant marketing tactic or just pure good decision-making by Sony, we're very pleased with the outcome."
Its still pretty cool though. Btw, here is a link to the dynamism page. Or is this supposed to be an article about an american release of the same product?
Actually, the OS is the last thing I'd bitch about with this product.
If you notice on the web-site, buying the OS is an OPTION. The mere fact that you can choose not to buy windows when you buy this machine puts it head and shoulders above almost every other PC-type product out there in terms of the OS.
I mean really, if you want to buy this device and don't like ME, just don't pay for it.
lysergically yours
There is no reference, whatsoever, that says anything about uncompressed video.
DV is about 13G/hour and the compression is through hardware. The unit probably uses that format and has a software codec.
The article doesn't say if this unit has a tape mechanism and the picture doesn't look like there is one. If it's only using the HD, no, 30G is not enough. You could work on 1 hour at most.
This is just a geek toy to try to impress the other geek in the next cubicle. It's not beefy enough or powerful enough to do any real work. It's also too awkward to use as a camcorder. Might be fine for shooting a few seconds at a time or recording part of a meeting but that's about it.
Well this one is a little different, it ships with win2k and has winME as an option
have a look at:
http://www.dynamism.com/gt3/specs.shtml
they will even put xp on it if you really want them to. And personally I would as the latest Avid DVxpress only runs on XP, and its posibly the best consumer level package behind final cut pro
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Woah ... What are we going to do with all of that? ... a video editing machine with 128mb standard ... upgradable to 256mb? That's a toy ... not a machine designed to handle video editing.
Seriously
$2299 Check www.dynamism.com for details
I know after compression and stuff you can fit two hour videos into under a gig w/ quite a bit of quality loss.
no that is with a TON of quality loss.
when I capture and edit from my XL1 camera a 15 minute long project has about 1 hour of footage. this takes up 10 GIG on my media raid drive.
when I slam it down to a 8000kbps bit rate Mpeg2 for dvd authoring it ends up being slightly less than 1 gig in size.
the compression rates you are talking about are for really REALLY low end and low quality.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Firewire might be fast enough ... it depends where the compression happens. This thing presumably shoots MiniDV-type video, which is 4/1 compressed *before* it goes into the computer, and Firewire should be fine. This kind of thing is even done by some pros using the old "two devices connected by a wire" trick. They shoot on DVCAM or whatever (a 25 MB/s stream, unless I've confused my terms) and stream it over Firewire to be recorded on disc in real time. The advantage here is that the whole 'log and capture' phase of video editing is skipped entirely, and with a dedicated editor they can have an assembly cut ready to watch by the time you're done shooting.
Of course, in that case, it's a $15,000 dollar DVCAM connected to a G4 laptop, not a consumer cam built into a consumer computer. You know that embarrassing geek thing where you describe computer technology as unbearably sexy? I hate that.