We did a few big purchases yesterday. JBQ bought the new Canon XSi 450D DSLR camera and a 135/2L portrait lens for his Canon 5D DSLR camera. He also got an extender for his big telephoto lens. He looked badass with his long telephoto (*cough*), so I snapped a pic of him today while he was trying out his new equipment. My baby worked hard for these.

If you look hard enough you will see the extender behind the telephoto lens.

Remember the five ducklings I saw a few weeks ago with their mother? Apparently their mother has disappeared and only two ducklings are left. At least they are looking healthy:

Geeks.com sent over for a review the Jazz Elite HDV-188 5MP HD video camera and a 2 GB SD card to go with it. This is a cheap digital camera selling at just $140 right now. It certainly sounds like a steal, but how good is it?

In the box we found the camera, a software CD, a Li-ion battery, a Quick Guide, a carrying pouch, a power adapter (100 - 240V 50/60 Hz), a USB cable, earbuds, an A/V cable and an HDMI cable. The camera is pretty small, weighs less than most digicams, and fits well in the hand. Unfortunately, the construction is pretty bad: the battery door is ready to give up and the LCD turning mechanism feels very flimsy. The “macro” slider too.

The HDV-188 has a 5MP sensor, 64 MB flash storage, SDHC support, NTSC/PAL and HDMI-out, and a rotating 3″ TFT screen. It also features digital image stabilization and a voice recording and mp3 playback mode. It has no optical zoom, only 8x digital.

The camera has a flash light and lens similar to the ones we see on some cellphones. There is no protective cap in front of the lens but a glass surface. It has an on/off button on the top but I don’t see anyone using that as the camera turns on/off automatically when you open the LCD. There’s a macro/normal focusing setting for the lens, a tripod hole on the bottom, astonishingly an HDMI port on the front, and a photo shutter button and a video record button on the back. Also on the back side you will find a rocker button that works both as a zoom in/out and a menu selector, along with a few more action buttons and the USB/AV ports.

It doesn’t take long to get used to the interface. There are QVGA, VGA, 720×480 and 1280×720p recording modes. There are also music and picture viewing modes. When you enter the main menu you can modify the exposure, flash light on/off, sharpness, white balance, stabilization on/off, motion detect (the camera will start recording automatically when detects motion) and night mode. The camera mode allows for multi-snap of pictures, self-timer and photo frame. All modes support a normal color mode, or B&W, sepia and negative. The main settings allow for camera sounds on/off (although there is a bug and the camera forgets that setting the next you restart it), format SDHC card, time setup, selection between NTSC/PAL, and support for 11 languages.

The camera records in h.264 AVI at 5 mbps when in 720p mode (1 hour of video in a 2 GB SD card, sample). Unfortunately, instead of using the much more common h.264 setup of MP4 and AAC, it uses AVI and the “MS ADPCM 22050Hz mono 88Kbps” audio codec that Windows Media Player and most of the freeware players didn’t support well (WMP and VLC had no audio even with ffdshow installed). Sony Vegas was the only application that I tried that was able to read both the video and audio correctly though! The video is recorded at 30.00 fps, but if you enable the image stabilizer the frame rate falls to 24.00.

In terms of visual quality in 720p mode, it’s horrendous. There is a lot of pixelation throughout, and if you start panning, there is even tearing in the video. I don’t see the point of including an expensive HDMI input on a camera like this. Now, the interesting thing is that if you record in 720×480p mode instead (2.5 mbps, can hold 2 hours of video in a 2 GB card, sample), the quality is much better than in 720p mode! Which leads me to believe that their 720p mode might be a marketing ploy, that is, being interpolated. Having said that, the audio quality out of the mic is good though. Better than on most digicams.

So the question remains, is this Jazz camera a better deal than an Aiptek or a Kodak HD camera at a similar price? In terms of visual quality, I would for an Aiptek instead. If I wanted both a pretty good digicam and an HD video camera in one, I would go for this Kodak instead (which also offers image stabilization while the Aipteks don’t). I would get this Jazz camera only if HDMI, image stabilization when in 480p mode were important to me. But its 720p mode is nearly useless.

Rating: 5/10

I am really bad at conserving power, as I have so many gadgets hooked up at all times (some of these older PDAs will lose their memory if they run out of battery).

So I decided to at least turn off the secondary 28″ 1920×1200 monitor of mine. It was used daily only with an XGA Firefox window in it, wasting over the half of the resolution of that big monitor with emptiness. So I thought, I should try to move my Firefox window on my primary monitor, and turn off completely the big secondary monitor (and only turn it back on when I do video editing).

Right now my 22″ 1680×1050 primary monitor is a bit crammed with an SVGA Firefox window, WMailLive and Trillian, but I think it’s usable.

Now, I need to get rid off of all these old gadgets that eat power for no good reason. It’s not that I use them anyway…

Last year there were a number of focus rings hacked together by enthusiasts to deal with the HV20’s flimsy focus roller button. The rings required quite some work to construct and it was adding to the bulk of the camera. Well, not anymore. The following solution is ingenious. It’s simple, cheap, easy, fast, and takes no space. HD version here.

Also check my friend’s Jay videos on how to pan smoothly with a fluid-head tripod and how to construct a dolly track.

I thought about the evolution of monitors I owned today. I got my first PC in 1995 (486 DX2/66 Mhz, 4 MB RAM, 420 MB drive).

1995: no-name 800×600 14″ color CRT.
1998: Belinea 1024×768 15″ color CRT.
2000: LG 1280×1024 19″ CRT.
2003: Sony 21″ 1600×1200 CRT.
2005: Dell 1280×1024 19″ LCD + above Sony.
mid-2005: Samsung 1200×1600 21″ vertical LCD + above Dell.
2007: ViewSonic 1680×1050 22″ LCD + 32″ LCD 1080i HDTV + above Samsung.
2008: HannsG 28″ 1920×1200 + above Viewsonic.

Quite a few announcements at NAB this week. From the worst to the best announcement:

By far, the most disappointing camera news came from Canon. Or, should we say, the lack of them. They simply modified their existing tape-based models. No next-generation stuff. They either working hard for next year, or they are seriously behind the curve.

The second worst news came from Panasonic. The HMC-150 and the HPX-170 are hardly HVX200 replacements. Not bad products, just yawwwwn…

Sony actually has pulled their shit together this year. After the release of the popular EX1, here comes the EX3. Now, that’s a camera! But at $9500 price tag, it’s indeed expensive for most.

And the big guns: the RED EPIC and the Scarlet 3k. The EPIC is a 5k camera, while the Scarlet, is a 3k one. The Scarlet is a marvel. It features a 2/3s sensor which can potentially provide quite some background blur all by its own. It shoots a huge resolution that puts Canon’s 1440×1080 prosumer cameras into shame. And all this, at less than $3000 (plus another $3000 for needed extras). Still, this is the cheapest camera you will ever get with these capabilities. A dream come true for every poor indie filmmaker.

Now, the HV20 ain’t that bad either for the $700 it costs. The other day HV20.com forum user LordTangent posted some screenshots captured from the HV20’s HDMI port instead via the tape (which would normally exhibit HDV artifacts, plus it would be 1440×1080 instead of 1920×1080). The captures are from the movie he is working on. Quality is extremely good (check this and this). I could say that whatever the Scarlet will be for the prosumer/pro indie market, the HV20 is for the consumer one today. Both ahead of the curve.

It is such a shame having to leave behind the two true American heroes of the ’00s because of budget cuts: Spirit and Opportunity. These rovers survived the front battle for years now, while the Generals didn’t expect them to live more than 3 months. They sent back useful reckon information to the architects of the war. And yet, they will be left behind, casualties of another war back at home, instead of their own war, a war that they were winning.

On other news, the war in Iraq costs the public $5000 per second.

Update: NASA now plays the PR game: he said, she said…

From TechConsumer: I picked up the Samsung, took it home, and within thirty minutes of setting it up, I realized that, in the words of Gob Bluth, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” […] Suffice it to say that the Samsung was back in its box within an hour, and peace was restored to the Shumway home as the Plasma reclaimed its rightful place as the clear, superior technology.”

After 17 days with our Pioneer plasma TV we are happy campers. The only, only, gripe we have is that it doesn’t feature Sharp’s “smart stretch” algorithm to stretch 4:3 to 16:9 (and they could have easily licensed that from Sharp, as Sharp owns part of Pioneer). Other than that, this is a NEAR-PERFECT TV. We love the smooth movie look, and JBQ surely enjoys the dot-by-dot mode where makes video games look pixel-perfect.

Update: We are selling our old TV.

The Nokia N810 arrived yesterday, and I will be writing a review for it at OSNews soon. It’s a nice device, but my hands are too small to comfortably write on its hardware keyboard (the device is still too wide for me). Also, I didn’t like that they changed the mini-USB to a micro-USB port. Everything else is good. Update: Review here.

Oh, and its webcam makes me look fatter than I am. Ho-ho…

My very intelligent JBQ (what a turn on!), wrote a blog post replying to popular Michael Reichmann’s opinions about digital photography. A very good read.