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A Tapeless Digital Camcorder For Your Pocket
spullara writes "I've been waiting a long time for a small, tapeless, easy to use digital camcorder. Tapes wear out, they require playback in realtime, and make producing ad hoc movies time consuming. Without these types of recorders you can forget about iVideoPodcasting. I found the Fisher FVD-C1 at an Apple Store last week and it was amazing, but it turns out there is a better one being imported from Japan, the Xacti DMX-C4 thats nearly identical, but better. You can read my review of it here (I have no association with any of these businesses). Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
The Xacti DMX-C4 is an amazing camcorder
As you might have read, my wife and I are having our first baby. So, of course, we needed a video camera.
One of the biggest complaints I have with mini-DV cameras is that you copy the data off them at the same speed you put the data on them. This is a nightmare. Additionally, tapes are terribly inconvenient to search, store, carry, etc. I was down at the Apple Store in Palo Alto on Tuesday of last week and saw a new camcorder there, the Fisher FVD-C1. It was amazingly small but easy to hold, used solid state storage, and had pretty good specs. At the store it was $800, so I wandered over to one of the Macs they have setup there connected to the internet and searched to see what the real going rate was. As it turns out, it cost about the same from Amazon. Later I did some more research and found a little company in California that imports Japanese only products into the US that had another version of the camera direct from Sanyo (Fisher OEMs their product). In addition to being the same size it also had 4MP instead of 3MP, a 1.8in LCD instead of 1.5in, and some improved software. Even better, it didn't come bundled with only a 512M card, instead it was $600 and you could buy a high-speed 1G SD card from them for an extra $120 (you can get them a little cheaper elsewhere, but i wanted it all to come at the same time).
Everything about the camera screamed buy me, so I did. I chose their cheapest shipping option (they are definitely making a bit of profit on their prices) and ordered it and a 1G card on Tuesday night. It arrived on Thursday morning, way sooner than I expected. All the manuals are in Japanese, fortunately I don't read those. Amusingly, it also talked in Japanese until I figured out you could change it to English mode by navigating the helpful pictograms.
Hooking it up to my Mac was trivial, it comes with a USB dock / recharging station that you just connect to your computer. It has a button on it to switch it between being connected and charging. I'm not sure if it is recharging when it is connected or not. Because it is also a still camera, when you plug it in and connect it, iPhoto launches and allows you to import any photos. Immediately I realized that I would need an efficient way to handle all the clips that I would be generating and I am a little bummed that there is nothing like iClips that comes with the Mac. I have some ideas about how that would work, maybe I should put something together. Instead of making a full fledged application, I instead did some applescript to get it setup with a Folder Action. So now when I plug it in, it immediately finds all the movies, renames them from their generic names to timestamp names, copies them to my Movies directory, and then if there are no pictures it ejects the camera and quits iPhoto all in one smooth motion. In the end I want to build something that lets me drop any of the movies onto a drop site and immediately reencode them for the web and post them to my website for consumption by the ever vigilant grandparents of our daughter to be. Speaking of photos, it does a pretty good job at those as well. Not as good as my Elph, but good enough.
There is only one thing that tripped me up that I would like to mention about the camera. While transferring movies from it I found that it was much slower than USB 2.0 should be. As it turns out, although it is spec'd for USB 2.0, it is for "full" speed, not "high" speed. So you should see transfer rates just about 500K/s. It would be much better if it were faster than that as that can mean 2000 seconds for a full 1G SD. Its still way more convenient than tape. I blame the USB committee for allowing devices to be touted as USB 2.0 when, in fact, they are the same speed as USB 1.1.
The movie/picture demo on their Yahoo store is pretty accurate and reflects the quality of the MPEG4/AAC recording that I have gotten while using the camera.
You can't handle the truth.
Wish i had the money to drop on a real tapeless cam. Bought one of these last week along with a 512MB SD card for parties. Mixed reviews, but the price is right for a poor college student.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Nah.. why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)
That's what i'll keep waiting for.
storage size is always a problem with tapeless digital cam, I've eyeing on Sony's DVD handycam, one DVD stores 1GB, but the size of the camcorder is as big as a 8cm DVD.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
While these sound 'interesting', I wouldn't want one. What exactly am I supposed to do if I want to go on vacation and not haul along a laptop to download the video onto?
Or I'm somewhere and the drive is full, and I want to keep recording. With a tape-based Camcorder I'd just run to (Costco/Walmart/7-11/Target) and pickup some more MiniDV tapes or whatever.
With this I have to upload the video onto another device...
And I have to worry about making sure to backup the device I download the camcorder's drive to. With tapes, while they are NOT indestructible, and they DO wear out eventually, and (with analog tapes) you can loose quality when you copy them, you don't have to worry about loosing all your recordings because the latest virus wipes your hard drives and you didn't have backups.
_MOST_ people are NOT going to be cluefull enough to make sure to backup their video from their hard drive to DVD or some other medium.
.sig
I've been looking for user experiences/reviews on this little gadget for weeks. Many thanks!
"Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
Yes, because my local electric car recharging station now has a WiMax hotspot...
Coral Cache link
Mirror Dot link
.sig
I'd rather spend $1000 on a Sony DCR-DVD301 (Google'd info) that records directly to Mini-DVD's.
And hard drives work perfectly, forever? At least you can easily swap tapes, they are fairly cheap, and most importantly, they handle shocks pretty well.
Tape-based digital camcorders can do better than realtime playback.
I don't believe it's merely the camcorder that makes producing movies time-consuming!
GOD NO! Imagine your camcorder being slashdotted.
Seriously though, I can't see any real use for connecting a camcorder to the internet directly. Yet the drawbacks are serious. Have we learned nothing from computer security?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
Wouldn't it be better if it had 802.11a/b/g so you could actually use it in the near future?
Please put some sample movies / pictures online. Specially showing the optical/digital zoom capacity. And maybe some low light movies to see its performance there?
I also have a question:
It got 5.8 times optical zoom and 10 times digital zoom. In video mode the camera only uses 0.3 MP of the available 4 MP (probably a bit more for the image stabilizer?). Anyways, when using digital zoom in video mode, will it simply use the remainder of the MP to do the digital zoom and thus provide a "loss free" digital zoom? Or is it similar to image shooting using digital zoom, where the resulting picture is blurred?
When I saw Fisher my mind went immediately to Fisher-Price. Yes, completely different, but does anyone else remember that Fisher-Price actually made a video camera at one time? It was called the Pixlevision and recorded to audio cassettes! The quality was poor, but just poor enough to look really cool. As I recall, they didn't stay on the market long.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I think that we should actually blame the company, who is putting labels on their product which overstate the technology. Compliance laboratories are worked pretty hard to my knowledge, and it becomes increasingly difficult to weed out products which poorly meet the specifications. I want to support a company which produces high grade equipment, not one who works just hard enough for the selling point.
jvc has 2 new digicamcorders with built in 4gig micro drives. not bad for $1000
7 00 0&pathId=119
http://www.jvc.com/product.jsp?productId=PRD120
It is not like this is a new problem, digital cameras with large MP ratings have the same problem. That is what these are for:
. ph p?code=CA-VP2060HD30&category_id=339a uspcmarket.com.au/show_product_info.ph p?code=CA-VP300HD30&category_id=339
http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/show_product_info
http://www.
I have seen one before that had a CD-R burner as well.
More at: http://www.xs-drive.com/
Sony is rolling out their Professional Disc line of professional video equipment. The central part of their XDCAM tapeless system is a 'Blu-ray' disc, storing approximately 24 Gigabytes of data. Professional cameras and VTRs supporting XDCAM can use multiple formats, including DVCAM [DV25] and MPEG-IMX.
Sony already had support for XDCam from AVID at the National Association of Broadcasters converntion in Las Vegas in April, one of the big names in Non-Linear (computer-based) video editing systems (NLEs).
Sony plans to make computer drives able to read and write XDCAM discs, allowing Non-Linear Editing without re-capturing.
Links:
XDCam FAQs (pdf)
MPEG-IMX White Paper [v2] (pdf)
Video Production Support
or lack thereof! hehe... not even close ;D
Although internet "backbone" pipes practically have more bandwidth than God, the LAST MILE connections DO NOT!
Putting WiFi card in camcorders to upload directly across the internet would be a very, very, very, very, very *BAD* thing. (At least for a while).
Timothy: I suggest you ask Santa for more "Troll Chow" for Christmas. If you run out, they are going to eat you instead!
[Of course, that could be a good thing for the rest of the community].
I use a MiniDV camera and record directly to a 30GB firewire harddisk. No need to use tapes, no need to capture. Sure, it costs a lot more, but it's a pro solution able to store two hours and half of video (DV CODEC).
Mustek DV-4000, see it at http://www.mustek.com/html/prod_camra/dv4000/dv400 0.html
I had one of those, it was really nice, i'd like better light sensitivity, but you can't get everything.
It had quite good image quality, one socket for SD card, battery, in-build recharger etc. Night mode and other juicy features.
It costed around 380-420euros here when i got one, altho i didn't pay that much.
It was really great for the price, and with 512mb sd card you can shoot over 2hours of video. encodes also MPEG4/AAC.
Only thing is: those vids didn't play in BSPlayer, on WMP they played nicely altho, after installing the WMV codecs which came on the CD. Didn't try other players.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
and then I considered the possibilities for pornography. The revolution is truly nigh.
The USB folk's naming and packaging recommendations actually discourage the use of "USB 2.0" since it is confusing as heck ... but I agree with the parent that they kinda created this monster by saying that there is a "Lo-speed" and "Full-speed" USB 2.0 that are the same speed as USB1.x ... so most consumers (myself included) see USB 2.0 and unless we look carefully for "Hi-Speed", then things aren't any faster than 1.x ... which is an issue for still photography and a BIG issue for video.
BTW, have we ever seen a first post that has been so informative - mod the parent to +10 - nice work roman mir
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Why stop at WiFi for uploading to the net?
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!
-- Obligatory, and the submitter asked for it
http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio/
I will wait for GZ-MC100 by JVC. CompactFlash can hold a lot more than SD.
Anyone using such a horrible made-up word should be shot. If you want long compound words, German is --> that way.
While these sound 'interesting', I wouldn't want one. What exactly am I supposed to do if I want to go on vacation and not haul along a laptop to download the video onto?
Or I'm somewhere and the drive is full, and I want to keep recording. With a tape-based Camcorder I'd just run to (Costco/Walmart/7-11/Target) and pickup some more MiniDV tapes or whatever.
Heaven forbid you should have more than one SD card...
If most of the country actually HAD WiMax...
Did you know you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
Am I reading the specs wrong or isn't it recording in full video resolution* ? 640x480 cannot be that funny.
What's the point of a videocamera that isn't recording normal video? Shure its moving images but I can get that with most digital stillcameras. Maybe it's the SD card that has a bandwidth limit but why market it as a videocamera?
However, this type of recording media is here to stay so we will hopefully see more of this type of cameras further on. but I shure expect them to have both full resolution and iLink/firewire like any other videocamera.
*NTSC 720x486px or 520 square px / PAL 720x576px
Uhhhh, about this sex thing...
Uhhh....
What's it like?
I would love to get a solid state camcorder,
but I have some issues with the media it uses.
For one, how would the camcorder handle
read/write errors in the media, especialy
where the file system is kept? Would it suffer from cross-linked clusters (very bad, scince
this would foul up the recording big time), or flat out refuse
to operate? With tape, if part of it is bad,
you might get annoying sound bars on the video and other artifacts, but this is usualy more of a
nusance than anything. Also, in extreme cases,
tape can be cut/respliced so if the tape goes
bad, you can still get most of your video off of
it. Can't say the same with flash cards. Also,
through user error or a hardware problem, the whole card could be wiped out (or rendered
unreadable) in an instant, which is generaly not easy to
do with tapes.
I would use something like this for impropmtu
get togethers, or to be able to whip this baby out of my coat pocket, and capture some event,
accident/whatever (much easier than taking my
VHS-C camcorder out of my bag, waiting for the
damn thing to power up and engage the tape...)
but for more important things, I think i'll stick
with take (keeping the Flash cam in my pocket....
just in case.)
While MPEG4 may be a nice format to store finished video in, it is not a good idea to use it as a storage format:
DV has a resolution of 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL). I'm not even sure if 640x480 is a standard DVD format (720x480/720x576 is); if not, this means recoding to different pixel size for DVD, which means quality loss independent of the encoding itself
Ok, this point might see some disagreement, but I consider it quite unfortunate that the trend goes away from FW to USB2.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Nice one, dipshit.
Panasonic have a few models out that write to SD card. Also, there's no real advantages of digital media over tape ATM and plenty of negatives.
Removable hard drive standard. Which could fit anything from a USB Flash Drive to a clam shell HD unit of your choosing.
Granted the power consumption would be awsome, but there is room for a "Little" more weight here considering that the cam is toughted at the size of a cell phone.
Now when can I expect to be able to write my own code for this thing?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I bought this camera specifially for it's video capabilities. It takes so-so pictures, but the video is excellent. It can record directly på MPEG which is a huge advantage. It can hold 30 minutes of high quality MPEG on the memorystick. ;)
Just thought I wanted to show you an alternative. I have no stocks in Sony (wish I did though
Underholdning.info
This guy is impatient. He's got a whole 13 years to edit together the baby videos to make the perfect embarrass-my-teenage-kid movie.
i've worked with digital tape camcorders, and all you do is plug it into the computer, tell it where the different shots start and end, then batch record them to the harddrive. it really isn't time consuming as usually you have to review the shots anyway to see which ones you keep.
and yes, the tapes degrade, but if it's recorded as digital you can record over them a stupid amount of times before you start to see any digital artefacts.
the real time consuming part is the editing, which doesn't need the camera at all. the only time i can see the tape being hugely more time consuming then the purely digital is if you were to plug it into a vcr and hit the record button to tape the shots you want in sequence, as with the purely digital camcorder you would fast forward/rewind shots instantly, so you'd save time fast forwarding the tape...
...I got nothing.
I am a little bummed that there is nothing like iClips that comes with the Mac.
Wouldn't iMovie work ok?
Haha, this is truly hilarious. ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE. Ok so either this guy's account is hacked, or he's a moron. I vote for the latter.
I bought the Fisher FVD-C1 and I can describe the video quality with one word, Awful! Also the sound quality was the worst I have ever experienced, tons of white noise and a hissing sound any time there was silence in the shot.
This camera comes nowhere near what Fisher describes as "DVD Quality". This camera is good for recreation and nothing more.
One thing I'll give Fisher is the build quality, very nice.
Panasonic SV-AV100 does record MPEG2 on SD card.
File size is still a problem though (even a bigger one than with MPEG4) but quality isn't as bad as MPEG4, and MPEG2 is much better than MPEG4 in term of editing and handling (you can actually USE what you record).
But these are still expensive products, I think Id'still go the DV way.
However, if I had the cash, I would have of these with me... the "on the go video" factor is really nice.
My big question ist this: With a 4 Megapixel chip, why do all of these camcorders still output standard PAL/NTSC/VGA quality and do not use the available resolution to its fullest?
Yes there are two HDTV-MiniDV cameras out now (JVC and Sony), but the JVC has a bad contrast range while the Sony has no real 24p recording (or even 25p would fill the bill).
When will somebody finally release a HDTV 1920x1080 camera with 24p below $3000? Or is there a way to fool these tapeless camcorder thingies in recording in a higher resolution?
Picked up one of these little babies on eBay the other day for around $350. DVD quality MPEG2, SD media. Record time is a little short, but the camera is literally the size of a credit card (ok.. a thick credit card). These have been around for at least a year now...
Er... here in Europe we call that "my phone".
Seriously, though... you guys don't have digital flash-memory video cameras on your cellphones? WTF? Digital still cameras have been standard on cellphones for the last two years, video and flash memory last year. I don't want to start a "diss the yanks" thread, I realise there are plenty of things y'all do better, but... you chaps need to have some serious words with your cellular providers, you're not getting good handset upgrades.
My phone has digital video camera and an MMC card offering up to 1GB of storage. The phone came free with 100 minutes of calls on a monthly £25 (US$50) contract, albeit only with a 32mb MMC card, then I purchased a larger MMC seperately for thirty quid. My missus got one too, free with contract again, here's footage she shot of squirrels in the churchyard.
I didn't even need to change contracts. I just rang them up and said I'd quit my contract after a year unless they upgraded my handset to a video model. It was delivered next day.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
No, it would not. Why would you want to make anyone sit through your hours of uneditted footage?
If only owners of video cameras (and those uploading _all_ their digital photos to an online gallery) learned to edit what they capture before submitting it to their friends the world would be a lot less violent place...
I recommend the Panasonic SV-AV100. Tapeless, 512M SD Card, 20min per tape (on good quality, there is a 10min/tape setting, but I find it's overkill). Very small, great battery life, nice unit all around (and Pansonic is the one brand, with which I've never had *any* disappointment; definitely an underrated brand).
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Ow, it's still morning. I need my coffee.
I'm not sure where the original poster lives. In the US, WiMax deployment is very spotty, at best. In fact, almost all point to multipoint broadband deployments are proprietary, non-WiMax solutions.
The municipality in which I live is about to deploy a proprietary variant of 802.11a for wireless broadband - the key variation of the standard that we'll use/need is mesh capability, required because our heavy tree cover requires enhanced non-line-of-sight capability.
WiMax has been mostly marketing hype thus far. A camcorder with WiMax would be a very strange product.
Okay, so copying a DV tape @ 720p over firewire is slower than this? Not. This sort of defeats his key point in the beginning of the "review
Agreed.
The review also talks of the being inconvient to store - good grief - if he's going to transfer them to the computer, why worry?
Secondly, if you're off on holiday and want to shoot a lot of video (and didn't want to lug a PC with you) then you'd still need a few flash cards - For the price of one 512Mb flash ram you could buy a bucket load of tapes. (shrug)
until they attach a cell phone or gameboy to it.
I fail to understand why manufacturers keep making products like this using SD cards. They are smaller, yes, but not by much. Would make much more sense to use CompactFlash so you can at least toss in a 2 or 4GB microdrive card. I can understand SD for a still picture camera, but not for a video camera!
And where are the hard disk cameras? Or should I say, AFFORDABLE hard disk based cameras?
if you have a decent eye, you'll see quit a subtle 'bad quality' in all of non-X3 CCD's ... due to it not beeing *of course* able to capture the some Red Green Blue wavelenghts per pixel/amount of 'photons', but instead utilizes a 'mosaic matrix' to compose the image *which is uurrrkkk, urruk, 'bad quality'* - I mean, just look at this interactive tutoral (java), see how many 'photons' a non-X3 misses? ... then think about that a camera then tries to compose a picture with that amount of 'phonon' count loss... *iirrk*
*crawls back to his geek-hideout :)*
PS. BTW $0.03 that this post is just one of those 'slashdot Post Ads'
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
BTW, I wonder what 'they' take for such a 'slashdot story ad'
guess *I'll* have to 'google' it ( as in 'search for it' not 'google-google' for it, :))
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
I'm probably a bit of a Luddite here, but I still like using DV tape, if only for archival purposes. I do a LOT of taping with my Sony DV camera and I do a LOT of editting to create really boring home movies on DVD. What I like about the tape format is that I still a have "raw footage" archive of everything without a lot of management effort. Going to a tapeless camera means that I either have to buy/keep an inventory of SD cards (or whatever) for big $$$ compared to DV tape (I think) OR get into the pain that it is managing disk/optical-based archiving of my raw footage. I just find that, with tapes, I can store them away without worrying too much (yet) about managing them. When the day somes that my DV camera gets replaced by something else, I'll convert the tapes to something else (as I've already done by transferring my old 8mm tapes to DV tape). Flame away....
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Here's a short review of the Fisher FVD-C1 from the current MacWorld article on DV Camcorders:
The Fisher FVD-C1 is one of a new generation of MPEG-4 video camcorders that eschew tape and record directly to storage media. Like a shapely silver iPod, the lightweight, compact Fisher comes with a docking station, fits contentedly in the palm of your hand, and begs you to play. Flip open the bright, 1.5-inch LCD screen, and a cheerful female voice chimes faintly, "Camera mode." Though not much bigger than a postage stamp, the menus are easy to navigate with a beadlike joystick that you control with your thumb.
In spite of its small size, the Fisher takes big pictures: still images at 3.2 megapixels, and video at 640 by 480 pixels and 30 frames per second. At the highest-quality settings, you can fit as many as 491 pictures, or about 21 minutes of video, on the supplied 512MB memory card. The still pictures are sharp and vibrant, but video quality is disappointing, with soft edges, banding (blocks of muddy pixels), and pixel artifacts. Lightweight camcorders like this one are difficult to hold steady, and it has no image stabilization. While the audio is sufficiently loud, we heard a whine and occasional clicking as the autofocus tried to keep up, and you can't use an external microphone.
We'd recommend any of the DV camcorders in our test group over the Fisher for video quality, even if it means hauling around a few extra ounces. And if you're looking for excellent photographs, you can buy a good 3.2-megapixel camera and a 512MB memory card for about half its price.
With a microdrive... looks pretty cool and ranges from 1 hour to 4 hours, depending on your quality setting.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
I almost wrote about this earlier, because it seemed to be such a secret. I bought a Sony DSC-T1 for my wife, just because it was tiny and had good image quality. What I never expected was full quality 30fps MPEG1 video. The video from this camera looks like that from a reasonable camcorder... which is amazing for its size. You have to remember that this thing is *tiny*.
What seemed so odd to me is that Sony wasn't advertising this feature at all. In fact the box says "digital still camera" right on it... It's weird. I haven't taken anything but video with it basically since we got it.
Now, granted with the max memory card size available at the time it only holds six minutes, but that's actually not too bad for many purposes... especially with the ease that you can drop the video onto your laptop.
Pat
Tapes wear out, they require playback in realtime[...]
It's pretty difficult not to do most things in 'realtime'. The phrase you seek, my child, is 'linear access'...
Or just Bluetooth that lets you control it with your phone, as well as upload via the phone's Net connection.
--
make install -not war
So you should see transfer rates just about 500K/s. It would be much better if it were faster than that as that can mean 2000 seconds for a full 1G SD. Its still way more convenient than tape.
I thought the thesis here was "get this camera because tape is too slow"? My Sony T1 stores 20 minutes of MPEG video on a 512MB card, so assuming you get 40 minutes on a 1GB card you're in for 33 minutes transfer time. For that 7 minutes you save you're in for $120 cards vs. $10 tapes, a more expensive unit to begin with, and sub-editing quality.
Neat idea, but it doesn't sound like it's there yet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I recommend reading through some of the Amazon reviews. Complaints of dead pixels, noise on the audio due to the zoom motor, jerky video, etc. If I were going to try this camera out, I'd make sure I got one from a place where I could return it if it was unsatisfactory.
Panasonic SV-AV100 which I own and love, but you need to rename the .MOD files it creates to .MPG. Then they are pretty much ready to be burned to DVD. Cradle interface and software sucks (and not Mac compatible), but everyone simply uses a USB2.0 card reader.
JVC GZ-MC100 Slightly bigger than the SV-AV100 but it has better optics and supports large CF storage.
If you want to stick with tapes, Sony is coming out with a fairly small DCR-PC350 which still uses miniDV tapes.
{ - Generic Guy - }
I don't own a camcorder in any format.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
I've submitted at least 5 news worthy stories and only this silly little blog entry was accepted. Now that I understand that you need something flammable, maybe I will get more stories published :) For those of you that say that this camera is not as good as a miniDV camera, you're missing the point. To those of you that think this review needs pics/movies, look at the website linked. To those of you that want more storage, buy the Belkin Media Reader for you iPod. For those of you that think its just a cool gadget and I'm a crazy early adopter, you're right. All I know is that I can take a movie and send it to friends and family much faster with this than anything else besides my iSight webcam. For those of you that say to get a camera phone, I have a 3650, movies on it suck. Maybe they will be better on the 6630 when it is released, I doubt it though. For those of you saying that WiMAX isn't released and it would be dumb to have it built in, you don't understand how things get published on Slashdot. To those of you that clicked on my Google Ads and sent me $3.38, I thank you. To those of you that question whether this was professional review, surprise, its not and I don't review products for a living. To those of you that copied the story to mirrors and into the comments, Phhhhht, I wasn't getting slow or slashdotted. I only got around 20k unique visitors.
Sam
"If I can see farther it is because I am surrounded by dwarves." -- Murray Gell-Mann
yeah, check out that lint.oooh baby.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
The good folks over at MCE Technologies have something similar. It's basically a firewire hard drive with some circuitry that allows it to control a DV camera. So you can record straight to the drive instead of (or in addition to) tape. If you get a big enough drive, this means you get much more capacity (although, of course, you need to do something with all that footage; you can't just keep buying drives like you can tapes; not yet, at least) and you don't have the extra step of importing footage from the camera to your favorite editing program.
;-)
Trouble is, these things are very expensive (although they have some cool extra features, like being ruggedized and mountable on your camera and they guarantee you won't get any dropped frames). Even so, I think they should just put all the logic circuitry into an iPod accessory. It would be smaller and probably cheaper too, and I bet most gadget freaks already have a 40GB iPod that still has 30GB (about 2.5 hours of digital video) available
I don't own one, so I don't know whether you can just replace the hard drive with a new (and bigger) one.
I read this as topless rather than tapeless. I was hoping for a real slashdot headline worthy topic. My bad!