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."

Comments

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.