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Olympus Preps MP3 Player With Cam & Color Display
igrp writes "Japan-based electronics manufacturer Olympus just announced their plans to enter the HD-based MP3 player market currenly dominated by Apple's iPod. What makes this stand out from all the other 'iPod killers' are their players' specs. Their top-of-the-line 'MR-500i' model sports a 1,22 MP camera, a 3.7" color touch screen VGA display with a slick-looking red backlight, JPEG support and according to this German newssite weighs in with a battery life of 8 hours. No word on prices and availability in the U.S. yet."
Useful for listening to tunes in the darkroom...
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So you can take a picture of yourself listening to music? I've never looked at my digital camera and thought "gee, I wish I could plug my headphones into that!".
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
This product is going to be either hit or miss. The camera is only 1.2 mp, which isn't exactly fantastic. Let's hope that the music quality and features don't suck.
Now I can have a digital camera in my cell phone, PDA, digital music player, underwear, toast, milk carton, and pencil.
We get the point, CCDs are cheap and small now. Isn't technology grand. Now stop shoving shit into places they shouldn't be.
Sure, you don't have to buy them all, and you can go for a model without a camera, but it seems that every 'high-end' gizmo that comes out has to have a camera onboard to sell, while at least for me, in none of these cases the camera is a reason to buy one.
Jan
Because, if you're like most people, you carry your phone with you everywhere you go, and leave your digital camera behind - unless you know in advance that you'll need it.
I use the camera in my phone all the time for those times when I didn't know I'd need my camera with me (i.e., a co-worker falls asleep at his desk and starts drooling).
You need to shift paradigms and stop thinking of it as a full-feature camera being shoe-horned into a product and start thinking of it as the equivalent of those disposable cameras you can buy (because you forgot to bring your nice camera), only without having to buy anything...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
That's why I have a printer and a scanner, the all-in-one units are quite good but I wanted a really good scanner and a printer that could do a great job printing photo's. That's not to say there are not features that can be combined. I think music and video could go together well, especially with the larger hard drives in the players these days.
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The problem with sticking a digital camera on another consumer device (like a cell-phone or PDA or, in this case, a digital music player) is that you have to make the optics very small and fixed focus. Which means you'll never be able to get very good pictures out of it.
This is completely correct, of course. And the reason for this is that with all of these devices you need to make them as small as possible. Besides the obvious engineering feat of putting in laptop circuitry, camera circuitry, and electric toothbrush circuitry all inside one cellphome, the fact is, it just doesn't make sense.
This is why, I think, there will never be a wildly popular laptop/pda combo. The PDA is supposed to be small. The laptop is supposed to be large enough to be functional. Then idiots like QOQOQOQQOO (or whatever that's called) make something in between that doesn't really do everything. I'd rather have a kickass music player instead of it having the ability to take crappy pictures as well.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Smaller, cheaper
a 1.22 mp camera and a VGA screen don't kill the iPod, that is not what the iPod is for.
Until someone can come up with something equivalent of Click Wheel... Ipod has the best UI and it shows. When I'm running around with an MP3 player, I don't have time to use stylus to tap on the touchscreen nor do I have the patience to marvel at the color VGA screen in its full glory... just let me play music quickly and easily...
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Adding additional feature to a good product would be a good idea, which is what Apple is doing to the iPod now. Making it great at one thing, then slowly improve it.. Trying to stuff a camera, mp3 player and digital picture viewer together isn't going to threaten the stronghold iPod have. Unless it does both of them better then the iPod does. And with a 1.3mp camera.. don't think it will do much.
if apple was once the dominating mp3 player but now on the decline, then your claim that apple is being stupidly stagnant holds water. however, they have been and still are dominating the mp3 player market...
It will be interesting to see how they will be marketed once this happens. Is it a camera with an mp3 player or vice versa?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I looked at everything in the market trying to avoid buying an ipod and saving, ultimately, some 70 euros. Know what? It's a bargain at twice as much...
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Actually, you brought up the biggest point to do this kind of thing. Most of these items have a certian minim usable size. Suppose you take a digital camera, to hold it steady it should be fairly large and have a little weight to it.
So if you can take the same package and drop in a HD, all of a sudden you can reuse the controls, battery and display for an MP3 player.
Same with a cell phone. Although the form is different, you can already have a phone that is way too small to use, so what are you going to do? stuff extra plastic in there?
The reason for the complaints here is probably that they haven't found the right form factor yet, hard drives don't fit into a good cell phone form, and the cameras they choose are usually low-res "bonus" items, but these things will change.