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

For similar items...

[mr.henry]

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.

Re:For similar items...

[megaversal]

Actually, Dynamism has had this listed for about a year now:

http://www.dynamism.com/gt3/index.shtml

Hibread?

[bc90021]

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". ;)

Note to Sony Re: combination laptop camera

[Bearded Pear Shaped]

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).

Um, why?

[I Am The Owl]

So, instead of a decent laptop and a decent camera, I can get a combination that does both poorly and probably costs only slightly less. Wow, what a gain.

Thanks, but I'll stick with Firewire and my Canon GL2

Re:hibread

[Lemmy Caution]

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.

Sony very please?

[canning]

Either way, Sony is very please with the outcome.

Not half as please with the editing job me bet.

New?

[juuri]

This thing has been out for over a year and this form factor has been out since 2001.

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.

Re:Looks amazing but is 30gig enough?

[FredThompson]

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.

I have one

[Tuqui]

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.

Why does SONY love Windows ME so much?

[toupsie]

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?

Re:Why does SONY love Windows ME so much?

[Transient0]

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.

I'll pass

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

it's from Sony

[SHEENmaster]

you'll be lucky if it can read an audio cd correctly. Momma Sony always said, "Burning DVDs is da DEVIL!"

Re:Add a little ...

[frankthechicken]

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.

Firewire is used for this, kinda

[Heisenbug]

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.