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."

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[denisbergeron]

DVD Burner and it will be great !

Looks amazing but is 30gig enough?

[1nsane0ne]

I have never done any kind of video recording, editing, etc. beyond your basic camcorder usage. So I have to ask, is 30 gig's of hard drive space enough for raw video to be recorded? I know after compression and stuff you can fit two hour videos into under a gig w/ quite a bit of quality loss. But for serious video recording editing I'm guessing 2 hours of video would be quite a bit larger then 1 gig. And it doesn't mention anything about on the fly compression (i dont know if that's even possibe / practical w/ today's cpu's and the software this thing has), so I'm guessing whatever format you record to is going to be huge. If anyone with any experience would care to comment on the size of uncompressed video files it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Re:Looks amazing but is 30gig enough?

[ottffssent]

Uncompressed? No. The article claims 680,000 element CCD. Assuming 24-bit color, that's 3 bytes * 30fps * 680,000 elements = 58MB/sec = 3.5GB/min.

Compression is possible though. I don't know if there's any built-in compression, but a Crusoe/600 isn't going to provide much. With my AIW Radeon (original), I could just barely encode to MPEG2 with a Duron/600. With a 1.8GHz Athlon XP I can record straight to divx (from TV, 640x480) at about 1GB/hr, 60-80% CPU usage.

30G probably is a good match for the battery life of the unit, using whatever compression Sony built in. They, as a company, have better sense than to make something horribly mismatched like that. Chewing-gum memory slot excepted, of course.

better, but..

[j-stroy]

Good effort, but the ergonomics don't seem quite right. Also surprising it took this long to integrate these technologies.

I am reminded of that Russian MiG which was flown out to Japan. The reverse engineering team was stunned by what was achieved with "old" technology that was tightly tuned and integrated. I look forward to innovations coming from places where technology has only trickled in due to economic or supply factors, making development more deliberate and well considered.

It's new to you! or not...

[sirtimbly]

The mention of PC Expo 2000, the low end specs of 128RAM and only a 30gig HDD, and the use of WinME and 2k instead of XP lead me to believe that this nifty little "hibread" has been around for a while.

Sounds sweet

[wastedbrains]

How much will a device like this cost when it finally hits the market. This is the kind of convergence technology means.

Re:Why all the hybrids?

[Moofie]

Me, I /hate/ redundancy. I think it's just dumb that I can't buy an optical disc jukebox that serves all my computers and my home entertainment system. I think it's silly to have four CD-ROM mechanisms scattered around, when one or two would do just as well (yes, you have to consider two users wanting to do diff. things simultaneously, but that can be engineered around).

With mobile devices, a PDA, phone, MP3 player, and camera (for example) have about 70% common components (by weight). So, if I'm clever, I can glom together four devices, each of which would weigh four to six ounces or so, and glom them into one eight ounce device (yes, I just made up those numbers). Yes, you need to solve a battery life problem, but I'd rather carry one spare battery for my Uber-Device than four separate devices.

The One Device hasn't yet been created, but I've seen a couple that are awful close. Kyocera's PDA/phone/MP3 players are awfully attractive.

Interface design: Do you need to be able to operate your PDA and your camera simultaneously? No? Then why would there be an interface problem? Several PDA/phones have arguably better UI than their individual components because you don't have to hold the PDA in one hand and dial with the other.

It just takes smart UI design and clever engineering. It can be done, and done well.

Is Sony's lap-camcorder an example of a good convergence product? Dunno. I'd have to play with it and evaluate the ergonomics. But I'm glad they made it, and I'll be glad to see the machines that replace it.

Just add 802.11xx

[su-geek]

I think they need to add wireless so one can record to a bsse station as bandwidth permits. I have been wanting to build something like this for awhile, I was going to use a single board computer and wireless + a screen of some type. I may still.

Re:Why all the hybrids?

[radish]

This idea that "integration is bad" in the computer age is just stupid. There has never been a tool as flexible and extensible as the PC, and there is no reason not to connect two devices together to share (processor, storage, user interface) resources.


That's the whole point - "connecting together" is fine, "putting in the same box" is not. The PC would never have been successful if they were not upgradeable. How many people on /. just buy a PC from Dell and never open the lid? Very few. Most roll their own from various components. Same deal here. If I want to be able to record video and edit it, I can select the components myself (a good camera and a good laptop) and connect them via, say, firewire. Putting them in the same unit means I can no longer select the components to meet my needs, I can no longer upgrade one part when my needs change, I can never leave one component at home because I won't need it on this trip.

Give me lots of small devices, with specific jobs, and make them talk to each other over standard protocols (bluetooth, firewire etc) so they can exchange data and co-operate according to my rules and I'll be happy. Bung everything in one big uber-device, and sorry, I won't be buying. The non-computer version of this argument is with HiFi, you'll replace my stack of individual components with some "integrated" POS over my dead body :)

Something just struck me - name an operating system which pushes the idea of lots of small tools with simple functions, which can easily be wired together by the user to perform more complex tasks. Now name one which tries to be all things to all people, with every button, gizmo and addon you could ever need, but no way of seperating out and replacing the different parts to suit your individual needs.

KISS :)