October 16, 2006, 4:26 PM PDT
Pure Digital makes the first Web 2.0 camcorder
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Pure Digital has upgraded the el cheapo flash memory camcorder it's been selling since May through retail stores, such as Target. See our previous blog post and review. The new version, which sells for the same price ($129 for a unit that will record 30 minutes; a 60-minute version is also available), has improved audio and video quality and longer battery life, company reps told me. The external hardware is the same: a generic-looking white case with one very interesting feature: a USB port that swings out to transfer data.

The real news is the improved software. Once you plug the device into your PC, it will automatically launch software that's stored on the camcorder to upload your videos directly to Grouper. Here's my first video made with the product.

There is no easier way to shoot and post a video. You can also take the device into a store (such as Target) and have a DVD of your videos pressed in about an hour.

There are downsides, though. The product is supposed to make it easy to upload to Google Video as well as Grouper, but for Google, all it does is put your videos on your desktop and open the upload page on the Google Video site. And it doesn't do anything at all for YouTube, although given the Google acquisition of YouTube, that may change. The software does make it easy to get videos off the device so that you can upload them wherever your want, but the lack of interactivity with other services is bothersome.

More snags: The software crashes if the unit powers down while it's plugged in, which it does automatically after a few minutes, and you will probably need to buy a USB extender cable, since when the device is connected, it is likely to interfere with cables or the table your computer is sitting on. And despite the cult-of-Mac glossy white case, its software doesn't automatically launch when you plug it into a Macintosh. Finally, the camcorder will not recharge when plugged in; even the lowliest $79 iPod Shuffle recharges when docked.

Power users and those who are bothered by products that seem to be not quite done will be better off shooting video with a real camcorder or with any modern point-and-shoot digital camera. But Pure Digital's device is still about the simplest tapeless video camcorder you can get by a wide margin, and it gets big points in my book for that. I also really like that the device contains its own software and can run it automatically when it's plugged in.

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September 26, 2006, 9:56 AM PDT
SanDisk CompactFlash hits 16GB
Posted by: Philip Ryan

Continuing the march toward ever-larger-capacity memory cards, SanDisk announced three new cards at the Photokina trade show in Germany. Two of the new cards, 12GB and 16GB CompactFlash cards, carry the company's Extreme III moniker, while the third, a 4GB SDHC card bears the Ultra II name. SanDisk says Extreme III cards can withstand temperatures from minus 13 degrees to plus 185 degrees Fahrenheit and rates them with sustained minimum read and write speeds of 20MB per second. SanDisk rates the new 4GB SDHC card at a write-speed of 9MB per second and a read speed of 10MB per second and will sell the card as a bundle with a MicroMate SDHC card reader, since SDHC cards require special SDHC-compatible readers and cameras. That means you should check to make sure your camera is SDHC-compliant before purchasing an SDHC card.

SanDisk has a nifty PDF on its site that explains what SDHC is and also has a page to help you find SDHC-compatible SanDisk products, but you'll have to check your camera's specs to see if it is compatible with the new standard. It would be really nice if the SD Card Association, which manages the various SD card standards, would publish a complete list of SDHC-compatible devices, but they don't yet.

Look for SanDisk's new CompactFlash cards to hit stores in December, while the SDHC card should be available in October. SanDisks expects the 4GB SDHC with MicroMate USB 2.0 reader bundle to sell for about $220, while the 12GB and 16GB versions should carry price tags of $780 and $1,050, respectively.

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• Read also: Camera accessories, Digital cameras, Digital imaging, Digital photography, Digital video, Flash cards
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September 25, 2006, 3:57 PM PDT
Epson's new photo viewers
Posted by: Philip Ryan

Epson announced two new photo viewers today, the P-3000 and the P-5000, as follow-ups to the company's current P-2000 and P-4000. In an attempt to increase the color gamut of the viewers' 4-inch, 640x480-pixel LCD screens, Epson has added a fourth color to the usual RGB LCD screen color-filter system. The new screen, which Epson calls Photo Fine Ultra, includes two colors of green, emerald-green and yellow-green, which is enough to let the display create more than 16.7 million colors, says Epson. The company also asserts that its Photo Fine Ultra display can reproduce 88 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut and includes support for that color space, along with sRGB in the viewers. Also included is support for RAW and JPEG images; MPEG-4, Motion JPEG, and DivX video files; as well as MP3 and AAC audio files. A pair of memory card slots lets you back up images from CompactFlash or SD cards, and with an adapter, most other card types. Plus, according to Epson, a new processor speeds up image downloads by up to 250 percent.

The only difference between the two models is the size of their hard drives. The P-3000 includes a 40GB drive, while the P-5000 doubles that to 80GB. Previous Epson photo viewers in this family have been much better suited to viewing images or video than to listening to music. However, Epson has updated the interface in hopes of creating a more universal entertainment experience and now includes the company's Link2 software to automate file conversion and playlist creation and management. As with past P-series viewers, all of this comes at a steep price. The P-3000 and the P-5000 have already begun shipping to stores, where they will be available at prices of $499 and $699, respectively.

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September 08, 2006, 10:04 AM PDT
My fight with Amazon Unbox
Posted by: Tom Merritt

I do not recommend you try Amazon Unbox, and here's why. Yesterday evening I decided to give the video download service a try, especially since it gives you a free $1.99 video. A nice touch, I thought. I chose a Star Trek episode called "The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky," because it's one of my favorites.

After the normal Amazon checkout rigmarole, I was prompted to download a proprietary video player from Amazon. It's the only way to complete the download. I wasn't too happy about this. It does download a WMV to a folder, so I figured, what the heck. At least I knew where the file was if I wanted to play it in another player.

Even after it downloaded fully, it wouldn't play. I tried several times in both the Amazon player and the regular Windows Media Player, to no avail. After less than two minutes, though, I found that if I dragged the progress indicator in the Amazon player a little, it would start playing. Maybe a bug on my part, who knows? Video quality was fine, especially for an old TV show. I enjoyed it.

I left work after that and rebooted my laptop at home. That's when the real trouble began. I noticed that the Amazon player had launched itself. Annoying. I looked in the program for a preference to stop it from launching itself, and there was none. Typical. So I went to msconfig and unchecked Amazon Unbox so that it would definitely not launch itself at start-up. When I rebooted, it was no longer there. However, my firewall warned me that a Windows service (ADVWindowsClientService.exe) was trying to connect to the Net. I clicked More Info in the firewall alert and found it was Amazon Unbox. Downright offensive. It still was launching a Net-connection process that even msconfig apparently couldn't stop. Forget it. That's not the behavior of good software. I went to uninstall it.

After the Install Shield launched and I chose uninstall, I got a login screen for my Amazon account. I just wanted to uninstall it. I shouldn't have to log in to my account to do that. So I canceled the login, and the uninstall failed. I tried that three times, and it failed each time. Finally I gave up and logged in and the uninstall finished.

So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can't burn to DVD and can't watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service. Try again. For more details and a rating of Amazon Unbox, check back for James Kim's full review. Update: I received an email from Sheila at DV guru saying that she hadn't had to log in to Amazon to uninstall. On a hunch, I reinstalled Unbox and this time allowed ADVWindowsClientService.exe to access the Internet when prompted by my firewall. This time when I uninstalled, I was not prompted to login. So ADVWindowsClientService.exe is connecting to the Net without your knowledge, even when uninstalling.

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• Read also: Digital video, buzz, home video, mp3
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July 14, 2006, 11:28 AM PDT
Video sharing for small groups, with Fliqz
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

What's the best way to share videos with friends and family, but not with the entire world? YouTube is a fantastic video broadcast service, but it's not so good as a private hosting service. There's a new site, Fliqz, that wants to be a YouTube counterpart: a video-hosting site for the files you want to share with people you know, but not with anyone else.

Fliqz is set up around that idea: there is a very clear navigational system that lists your friends, their video albums, and the media inside each of the albums. Videos you publish can have one of three access levels: public (your videos will be available to anybody on Fliqz.com), private (anybody you send URLs to will be able to view your video), or private plus password. It's nice to have that level of granularity for access to personal videos, although Fliqz doesn't go the final step and let you manage individual users' passwords.

Fliqz has no storage limit, which is a nice feature. But it does have a functional upload cap: you can't upload files larger than 100MB via the Fliqz site, a serious limitation for home movies (arguably, users can recode their videos using a tool such as Windows Movie Maker, but who wants that extra step?). Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne told me the company will give those who ask FTP upload access if they want to upload larger files, but that manual step strikes me as another roadblock. And I don't like the current Web-based upload utility. Not only does it not show a progress bar, which is a drag when you're uploading a large file, but there's no protection against navigating away from the page during the middle of an upload. Imagine the fun of being 90MB into a 95MB upload on a slow DSL uplink when you hit the Back button by mistake. A desktop upload widget (which hopefully will allow both larger file upload and batch upload) is forthcoming, Wayne told me.

Wayne sees Fliqz as a video shoe box, a place for people to store and share home movies. The site has some good thinking behind it, but free video hosting is not a unique service, and before I can recommend this site, its core upload utility needs work. Personally, I'm using VideoEgg right now to share videos with family, and I don't see a need to change, although VideoEgg doesn't offer a shoe box interface like Fliqz does.

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June 20, 2006, 6:01 PM PDT
Blip.tv, the videoblogger's control panel
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Mike Hudack, the CEO of Blip.tv, is on a mission to rescue videobloggers from video hosting sites and services that "aren't about individual empowerment." He feels that most of the video sites snag all the digital rights they can and make money on the backs of other people's work. Which sites? You(tube) know which ones.

Although Blip.tv does allow consumers to surf for videos on the site, the core function of the service is that it allows its users to take video they upload to Blip's servers and easily push it out to external sites, including blogs (it directly supports Wordpress, Moveable Type, Blogger, and more), iTunes, Del.icio.us, Flickr (snapshots only), and many other formats. It can also act as an intermediary for your camera phone, automatically cross-posting videos you sent to Blip.tv to whatever blogs or sites you've configured.

Like the viral video sites, the Blip service hosts the video streams. But unlike other services, Blip.tv does not brand the videos with its logo, so users can take full advantage of the service without confusing their viewers about whose site they are watching.

What's in it for Blip.tv, then? It's not fully rolled out yet, but the service will be supported by advertising. If users will accept ads on their videos, Blip.tv will share the revenues from the ads 50/50. Blip, for its part, will run the ad network and host the videos, as well as give users a lot of control over the ads they'll take. For example, users will have the option of accepting video ads that run before (pays well but obtrusive), after (the reverse), or even during their content--although the technology to find good places to insert midstream commercials is still being developed.

There are plenty of video hosting sites and even some with similar advertising revenue schemes, such as Revver. The market for video sites and services is still very young, but so far, Blip.tv looks like a solid toolkit for video bloggers.

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June 14, 2006, 9:27 AM PDT
Philips announces new Portable Media Center
Posted by: David Carnoy

One of the more intriguing items that Philips was showing off at its annual Holidays in June event in New York City was its upcoming Portable Media Center, the PMC7230, which features a sharp, 3.5-inch display and a 30GB built-in hard drive, plus the ability to dub TV shows from a VCR, a DVR, or recordable DVDs.

The PMC7230 is competing with several new portable media players that have been trickling onto the market as Apple's iPod with video has taken off. The obvious advantage to the Philips player is its ability to record directly from any video source, such as a cable or satellite box or a DVR, but the drawback is that you're recording in real time--if a show is 30 minutes long, for example, it'll take 30 minutes to record. The PMC7230 also seems to be the near-ideal form factor--while it's compact, the screen isn't so tiny that you have to squint to see it.

Like most portable media players, the PMC7230 plays music and displays JPEG photos along with videos ripped in the MPEG-4 format. Philips says you'll get as much as 5 hours of battery life when playing videos and up to 18 hours when playing music. This model is also PlaysForSure compatible, which means that it works not only with PlaysForSure audio services such as Musicmatch and Napster but with PlaysForSure video services such as Vongo and Movielink. The glossy black Portable Media Center is due this September and will carry a list price of $349.99.

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• See product information for Philips Portable Media Center PMC7230
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June 08, 2006, 12:53 PM PDT
Panasonic intros next-gen SD camcorder, new card
Posted by: Lori Grunin

Although the company hasn't indicated U.S. availability, Panasonic Japan has announced the SDR-S150, the follow-on to its SD-S100 SD-based camcorder. The SDR-S150 has almost identical specs to its predecessor--three 800,000-pixel CCDs, optical image stabilization, and a 2.8-inch LCD, for starters--but supports SD cards larger than 2GB. This announcement coincides with--you guessed it--Panasonic's 4GB SD card news. Both are slated to be available elsewhere in August.

The 4GB card is the first to bear the SDHC logo: SD High Capacity. In reality, the logo is more important for the read/write hardware, such as digital cameras; basically, it says, "FAT32 spoken here." The other aspect of the latest iteration of the SD spec also clarifies--and I use the term loosely--card performance by clumping them into groups by minimum sustained data transfer rate (MSDTR): Class 2 equals 2MB per second, Class 4 equals 4MB per second, and Class 6 equals 6MB per second.

The only possible rationale I can see for this system is to allow marketers to snow consumers with ambiguous performance claims. To wit: a card with a 3.5MB-per-second MSDTR and one with a 2MB-per-second MSDTR both become Class 2 cards, despite the fact that the former's performance is closer to that of a Class 4 card than of Class 2. Why can't they just report the actual MSDTR or translate the performance to some sort of normalized scale (along the lines of the older x ratings) if people are scared of the real rates?

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• Read also: Camcorders, digital video, flash cards
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May 18, 2006, 5:03 PM PDT
Spice up your photos with VMix slide shows
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

I believe the world has a sufficient supply of photo- and video-sharing services, but that isn't stopping companies from trying to nab a slice of the market. Case in point: VMix, a video-sharing site that offers the usual video upload and viewing features (as well as a camera phone upload feature--YouTube was not the first). Its special power: an easy way to turn a bunch of photos into a slide show, with a music track, and slow zooms and crossovers like a Ken Burns documentary. You can do this with iPhoto on a Mac, too, but VMix works on a PC (or a Mac), and it works over the Web--no software is required.

It's a clever tool for adding life to photos. See my take at a slide show. You're in control of the pacing and the captions, and the capability to add music makes a big difference in emotional impact. At the moment, unfortunately, there are only a very few music tracks to choose from, but CEO Greg Kostello told me that there will soon be thousands of rights-cleared indie tracks available.

The slide show creator tool works well for the most part but could stand more development. For example, uploading photos is tedious: you can't drag photos from your desktop into the creator tool, and the file selection window is tiny, so it's hard to find the photos you want. There are limited transition effects; the zoom effect only zooms in, not out, for instance. And in my testing, slide shows took forever to buffer before they started to play, although videos from VMix play almost immediately.

There's also a limit on slide show length: 180 seconds. But this is a huge bonus, if you ask me. Watching a slide show of a dozen or so photos set to music beats paging through an entire vacation's worth of undifferentiated pictures any day.

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May 18, 2006, 6:02 AM PDT
Grouper Webcam recorder bypasses your hard drive
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

I think I've written enough about cell phone-to-Web posting utilities (ShoZu, YouTube Mobile, and ScanR) lately. It's time to cover another way to get video to the Web. This morning video site Grouper is launching a tool that lets you record directly from your PC or Mac Webcam onto the Grouper site. I tried the product yesterday (see my lame video) and found it drop-dead easy to use. Grouper also links directly to Friendster and MySpace (it's yet another company feeding the MySpace beast). After I recorded my video, I had Grouper send it over to my MySpace profile. It took all of five seconds. Nice.

Since there seems to be so much activity in the cellular video market, I asked Grouper CEO Josh Felser why he launched a Webcam upload utility ahead of a cell phone product, especially since he said to me in a previous conversation that Grouper was all about allowing its media to become "untethered." Indeed, Grouper is one of the few video sites that makes it easy to download videos to iPods, PSPs, and desktop PCs.

Josh said that Grouper will soon release a mobile upload utility but that, at the moment, he counts more video-capable PCs than video cell phones. And he believes the potential for community video is untapped. Why should users on a video site be limited to text-based comments, for example? On Grouper now, users can stay in the medium, posting video commentary on videos they watch.

The capability to record directly to the Web, instead of using a PC or Mac as a way station, could also make a big impact on podcasting. In fact, there's already a tool, PodOMatic, that not only lets you record directly to the Web, but also has editing and hosting tools designed for podcasts.

Both of these services (Grouper and PodOMatic) could use better online editing utilities (such as JumpCut), but even at this early stage, they are useful utilities, and they're giving us a pretty clear preview of a future in which there may not be any need for desktop-based media-management software.

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