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Philips Demos Keychain-sized Camcorder
mateub writes "Philips gave PC Magazine an exclusive demo of the KEY019 USB camera/camcorder etc. Sez PCMag: 'You can use the 128MB of internal memory for 2.0-megapixel still shots, digital video, MP3 files, and document storage.' How long before we read the first story of some, um, inappropriate footage captured with one of these?"
That's a pretty sweet little toy. I wonder how much one of those costs... and how effective is it? I know there's probably a thousand different uses for something like that.
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This is great and all but who wants 2 megapixel anything? Camera phones, this device are create for getting quick shots, but honestly do you want to archive them? They simply don't look good, because the color is off, usually they're fuzzy etc...
I'm not knocking this device, but I have a feeling it's a sign of better devices to come. With in a year or 2 I would bet you start to see 4 and 5 megapixal devices like this... This is when they are really going to take off!
Add something like this to a radio controlled model airplane and you've got a (relatively) cheap platform for surveillance or air survey work. Could have uses in archeology as well.
On the other hand, I record TV shows on my computer, and I've set the bitrate so 1 hour fits on a CD (700 megs) and the quality is pretty good IMHO. So at the same bitrate, 128 megs would hold around 10 minutes of video. I don't know about you, but I seldom shoot more than 10 minutes of Camcorder footage for anything, because it would be too boring to watch.
I bet they don't have a high-pass filter on the CCD, so they'd be infrared sensitive. You could illuminate with an IR led, and no one would even see the light source.
Oh and television capping at a really high bitrate and then post-recompressing to a 2-pass codec (Xvid, mpeg2, divx, whatever you want) will give the exact file size you want and much better results compared to fixed-rate low-bandwidth encoding. Thats why these types of camcorders suck, they do fixed-rate at low bitrates and 2-passing later only gives lower file sizes of the already crappy looking video.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
$91 for that "SiPix Pocket DV Camcorder" is a waste of money.... oh did you say you bought one?
The A70 is the same size but takes 3mp and 640x480 video, although it's considerably more expensive.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
...it sounds great, but it is $100 more expensive than the Gateway (the current best buy for tapeless camcorders, because it's not $800 like most). It has double the memory, but lacks a card slot (and an LCD display). So for it's value, well, I'd say they're both good buys for people who want an ultra-cheap camcorder that's small (these things go for convienience and such, not for super-high quality) and just fun. I'll probably buy one of these things just so I can always have a camcorder around to take video of stuff that happens (I don't want to have my "real" camcorder with me all the time). For now, that's really what I see the market for these (and, say, camcorder phones) is - when these things have hard drives, well, then they might be more of a viable alternative to a "real" camcorder. But like them a lot now - they're tiny, cheap, and you can always have them with you to capture life - in all its spontaneity.