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Disposable Camcorder

Posted by Zonk on from the yay-toys! dept.

shamowfski writes "CVS Corp on Monday began selling a disposable digital camcorder. The $29.99 pocket-sized camcorder was developed by Pure Digital Technologies Inc., a San Francisco-based start-up company. The camcorder weighs under 5 ounces and holds 20 minutes of digital video and sound. It features a 1.4 inch color playback screen and an ability to delete video, and it saves video on a memory chip instead of tapes. Can't wait till they hack this one."

2 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. more info & the PV2 still camera with LCD by morcheeba · · Score: 5, Informative

    As pointed out yesterday on engadget, these cameras have been out a few months -- it's just that the press release came out recently. Yep, it's from the same company that made the hacked still camera.

    The community working on hacking this new camcorder is located at:http://camerahacks.10.forumer.com/viewforum.php ?f=13

    These cameras seem to have an external program memory, so it might not be too hard to hack. The forum above also has dissection pictures.

    BTW, last summer PureDigital came out with a still camera called the PV2. Unlike the one that was previously mentioned on slashdot, this new one has an LCD post-view screen and it's based on a completely different chipset. It has also been hacked. I figured out the authentication mechanism on this and most of the communications. Others got the camera to work with standard drivers and are figuring out the proprietary raw format. I wrote a disassembler and have published commentary on the built-in firmware, but you'll need a camera & firmware file to make sense of it. The firmware is protected by a checksum, but that was easy to find and correct.

    main pv2 forums
    PV2 FAQ from the forum - a great starting place
    my FAQ's
    unofficial devkit for writing your own programs.

    --
    HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
  2. Re:Wait a second... by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 5, Informative
    TFA is misleading. Not disposable, but instead reusable.

    Take your video, return the camera to CVS, and they burn it onto a DVD for you. Erase the card, and sell(rent) it to you (or someone else) again. Just like the 'one use' still cameras.

    This WILL be hacked to allow home retrieval of the video. Wonder what the resolution is?