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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."

7 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. For similar items... by mr.henry · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:For similar items... by megaversal · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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

      --
      Sig!
  2. Hibread? by bc90021 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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". ;)

  3. Note to Sony Re: combination laptop camera by Bearded+Pear+Shaped · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 ?
  4. I have one by Tuqui · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Looks amazing but is 30gig enough? by ottffssent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Looks amazing but is 30gig enough? by FredThompson · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.