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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."
This looks like something this place would sell. They have all sorts of cool import notebooks and gadgets. The stuff might seem expensive, but just remember all these electronics are going to help you get laid.
Is that what you'd get from a stoner Subway employee?
;)
Yeah, we, uh, have this new kinda bread for our sandwiches... it's, uh, got a "special ingredient". We call it "hibread".
libertarianswag.com
It's called a wire
You plug it into shit
This is the technology that allows the internet to be on seperate computers (as opposed to one big one).
Who are y oo ?
Thanks, but I'll stick with Firewire and my Canon GL2
--sdem
I winced when I read that - I keep wanting to send Slashdot a dollar so that they can buy themselves and editor. Anyway, I think he meant "hybrid." Of course, I think you mean "high-bred," so there's that. Of course, maybe everyone meant, "Hi, Bread!" It's good to greet your baked goods.
Either way, Sony is very please with the outcome.
Not half as please with the editing job me bet.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
This thing has been out for over a year and this form factor has been out since 2001.
--- I do not moderate.
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.
Check out my life
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.
I have noticed that SONY uses Windows ME on a lot of their unique notebooks. The PictureBook uses it as well -- they are almost impossible to upgrade to Win 2k. I never understood SONY's passion for the quirkiest Windows release with its notebook.
Anyone know why?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
What's so cool about a swivelling screen? Considering how quickly and often laptops develop swivelling screens when the hinges break, I just sort of thought they were intentionally designed that way. Or are they trying to sell this as a feature now?
Little laptop with a swivel screen? OK! (think car PC)
Reasonable quality digital camcorder? kewl!
Trying to stabilise the camera with the added, needless weight of a laptop? No thanks.
A camera that has to be upgraded when the laptop is passe'? No thanks
Sending my laptop back when the camera dies? No thanks
Or sending the camera back when my laptop HD dies? No thanks.
you'll be lucky if it can read an audio cd correctly. Momma Sony always said, "Burning DVDs is da DEVIL!"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Did you not just see me disparage it?
--sdem
If we're adding accessories, can I add a couple and remove one, take away that keyboard , add a touch screen, put in a mobile phone, and you have something I might be interested in. Oh and make it fit in my back pocket. Sort of like a Ericsson p800 Mark X. That I might be interested, as long as I could whack a version of mame on there, and perhaps a GBA emulator, and maybe a corkscrew.
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.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
They are experiments, a celebration of both people and technology. nobody knows what will work, really, and people always find unintended uses for stuff. so yeah, a swiss army knife is an inferior replacement for all the separate components, but the swiss army knife is about convenience, not being the best corkscrew or tweezer in the world.
must... stay... awake...
Instead of mixing these 2 devices together, I suggest just let those two device support some kind of wireless protocol (WiFi or something similar) so they can have the same functionality as this device, but they need not be connected to eachother physically...
Okay, it might add up a bit to the weight (extra battery pack for the 2nd device), but then, you don't need to carry the whole device in your hand...
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.