Greggman.com Category (gadgets)

Sony DSC-N1

So after that disaster of my last digital camera I set out to get something I could actually use. I still would perfer a swivel lens and a 5x or greater zoom but basically that combination does not exist. There are only 2 or 3 cameras period that have swivel lenses and there are only 2 or 3 consumer level cameras that have greater than 3x zoom so I was pretty much stuck settling for less.

I checked the reviews sites at it seemed like the Fuji Z2 was the current king of the consumer cameras. It's got the highest rating and is selling like crazy. It's very compact and its specialty is it has an ISO 1600 rating so it takes good pictures in low-light situations without a flash. That in particular is probably the best reason to own one.

So, I set off to go look at it and whatever else was available and while I was out I stumbled on the Sony DSC-N1.

It's biggest noticble feature is a giant touch screen on the back of the camera.

After playing with the touch screen it's hard to go back to the typical clunky menus on other cameras. All random reason disappeared and I wanted the DSC-N1. I waffled for about an hour looking at both the Fuji-Z2 which all the reviews recommended and the DSC-N1 and I finally thought I let rational thought win and decided to get the Z2. That was until I realized the Fuji cameras all use XD memory cards (yet another standard). I don't have any XD cards and I don't even have a XD card reader even though I have 3 7in1 card readers. So, that gave me just enough of an excuse to get the ignore reason and get DSC-N1 :-p

So, how is it? Well, I can say it's a million times better than the previous crappy Coolpix S4 I got in September. (I sold that to a used gadget store at a $200 loss :-(). The first random thing I tried, I walked through my local supermarket and took pictures of things that are common in a Japanese supermarket that are probably not common in your local supermarket. I'll post those some other day but the point is, the N1 had no problem taking them clearly and quickly with no flash, something the S4 would have completely failed at without a tripod and even then I suspect the S4 would have taken poor pictures. It turns out the N1 has a ISO 800 rating which is second only to the Fuji Z2 so it does a pretty good job without flash where other cameras would fail.

The N1, unlike the Coolpix, lets you optionally set almost every setting including letting you take up to 30 second exposures! Yes, you do need a tripod or some place to set the camera for that but it does take some amazing pictures.

A silly but fun never the less feature is that once you've taken a picture you can go into paint mode and draw on the picture using the touch screen. They've kept the options in paint mode pretty small, a few brush sizes, only 10 colors and the a set of shapes you can stamp. Still it's surprisingly fun to take a picture of friends and instantly make fun of them drawing them doing something embarrassing.

Other features: it will take 640x480 30hz video. They come out as huge files but still it's nice to be able to do it. It's got a few meg of onboard memory so if you forget your memory card you can take a few pictures. It's got a cool or silly, depending on your point of view, slideshow mode. You can pick different background music including loading up your own and then pick from 4 or 5 different styles of slidehow from the standard flipping between pictures all the way to fancy crossfades, wipe and scroll cuts and even one mode called Nostalgic mode which looks surprisingly like this screensaver except everything is shown in black and white.

A strange one is that in manual mode you can use the touch screen to tell the camera which part of the image you want it to focus on. Arguably you'd do that on a non-touch screen camera by pointing the camera at the focus point, pressing half way on the shutter, moving the camera to the angle you want to take the picture and then pressing the shutter all the way. That might sound complicated but it's actually pretty easy. In other words, the ability to use the touch screen to do the same thing is not all that special but there's still something fun about it.

Overall I'm very happy with it. It's no bigger than a Canon IXY 50 or similar Canon and so far it's taking pretty great pictures. At 8.1 megapixels there's lots of room to edit as well. :-)

Sharp W-ZERO3

So I was out today buying myself a Christmas present (more on that later). While I was out I stumbled on the Sharp W-ZERO3. It's a Windows CE pda, with VGA screen (640x480), digital camera, cell phone, wireless ethernet and mini keyboard all for only $350. Considering the cheapest 640x480 CE PDA I know of is the Dell at $599 and the dell does not include cell phone or camera or keyboard that's a pretty amazing price.

It's slightly thicker than most PDAs I guess, mostly because of the keyboard.

The really strange part is Sharp has a line of PDAs called Zaurus. They all run a custom OS based on Linux instead of Windows CE. Looking at Sharp's webpage there is no mention of the W-ZERO3 on the Zaurus pages. I'm guessing that means this is probably not made by the same division.

It might finally be time to upgrade. I've been wanting a new PDA for years to try to actually use it as a PDA. My current PDA is like 6 years old, has no power, can't run most software, so I only use it for my Japanese<->English dictionary.

I guess it's actually been out a couple of months but I didn't see one until today.

Nikon Coolpix S4 : Avoid at all costs

I've been wanting a new digital camera for a long time now. My old one, a Sony DSC-F505 is 6 years old now, it's only 2 megapixels (same as my cell phone) and it's relatively large meaning I'm no longer willing to carry it with me all the time. I wanted something I could slip in my pocket if possible but that still took reasonably good pictures. I'd also really wanted something with at least 5x optical zoom which really limited my options. Most cameras are 3x zoom.

So, just about the time I really needed a camera as I was going on trips to both Osaka and Malaysia I decided to go get one. At first I was thinking of just settling for a Canon IXY-55 or 60 or 500 etc. They met NONE of my requirements except being small but that's probably the most important attribute because I knew I wasn't going to carry anything large. Still, they don't really take good pictures judging from the ones my friends take with them. They are really only good for polaroid quality pictures taken at a party (assuming you use the flash)

I went online to see what else was available and found out Nikon had just released a new camera, the Coolpix S4. It's similar to the old 900 series Coolpix with the swivel lens (swivel lenses are SOOO much more fun then non-swivel) and it had 10x optical zoom!!! Based on the reputation of Nikon I decided to go for it. Boy did I lose.

Unless I go out and actually take comparison images with multiple cameras it's really hard to show what's wrong with it. Basically it comes down to after taking about 250 pictures, nearly all of them suck.

The S4 can't seem to take a single picture without a tripod. If your hands wiggle at all you'll get a blurry picture. Sure, you should hold still as possible but I have another camera that doesn't have this problem. There's something specific to the Nikon that requires it to be held SUPER STILL. Even worse, it's got anti-jitter tech built in so it's supposed to deal with non-still hands better than one without that tech yet nearly 80% of my pictures are blurry.

Even worse, it tells you they are blurry when you take them. I guess telling you is good since you can then take another picture but when you try 8 times in a row to take a simple picture and 8 times you're told "Picture is Blurry" then you pull out your other camera, take the same picture in one shot no problem, something is wrong.

On top of that, 80% of the pictures I took have major bloom problems. Bloom is where some brighter spots in the picture kind of generate a halo around them that washes into the rest of the picture. Well, this S4 has that problem in 4 of 5 pictures and I'm not talking about pictures it uber contrast either. My old camera rarely has that problem if ever.

I took a bunch of pictures for a page I was going to put up on Japanese Nabe 2 days ago. Today I loaded them up, all of them are unusable. Pissing me off I decided to go to my kitchen where I took those pictures and take a simple picture of an apple on a cutting board with both my 6 year old camera and the S4. My 6 year old camera took the picture instantly. The Nikon, the first picture came out too dark. Checking the settings I put everything in automatic. It took me 7 tries to get it to take the picture and not tell me "Picture is Blurry" and that picture is acutally still blurry compared to the picture from the old camera.

The Nikon also has a situational setting mode. You flip the switch then when you pull up the menu you can pick from one of about 20 situations, Sports, Party, Outdoors, Night Scene, etc. I picked Party thinking that means "indoors", unfortunately that put the flash on and you can't turn it off (I never use a flash). I looked again and found a setting "Museum" which I assumed means "indoor-no-flash". It took the picture, the picture is not blurry but it's also super noisy compared to the picture my old camera took as well as being too dark. In fact the picture looks banded almost like it's a solarized picture.

Other issues, my old camera has a point exposure option where you could tell it to only consider the center of a picture when deciding on the exposure. You point the camera at something and you can see the image get adjusted in realtime. So for example in a picutre of buildings with a bright sky in the background you can point it toward the sky and get all the cloud details but nearly black buildings as it adjust for the sky or you can point it at the buildings in which case you'll see the details on the buildings but the sky will be washed out. Once it appears as you like it you hold the shutter button halfway down then point the camera where you actually want to take the picture. This Nikon has no such option so many pictures are basically not possible to take. :-(

Clearly I lose, this camera SUCKS ASS. That's my *official* rating. Avoid it at all costs. Don't even consider it. It's piece of shit.

Now the question is what to get instead. I don't agree with my friend that you need a top end camera to get good pictures. Or rather, I don't agree that it's not possible to make a good low end camera. I might agree that all the manufactures are purposely making their consumer models take poorer pictures just so they still have a market for their upper end cameras. The proof is in the 8 or so cameras I've owned. Some took awesome pictures in all kinds of situations, situation my friend would claim require x,y or z but these cameas didn't have that. But, if all the manufactures are in fact making crappy consumer cameras then maybe I'll have to go SLR. Unfortunately I know I won't use an SLR as it's WAY TO BIG TO CARRY. :-(

ps: I've actually wondered if this is a hardware problem or a software problem. For example, maybe the Nikon software takes several samples over time to make an image. It then averages them together giving a less noisy image. Unfortunately that means longer exposures, more blur. If true, a firmware upgrade could fix the blur problems. Whether or not the bloom problems are related I don't know. Also, some cameras post-process the image trying to make them *better* on average. I assume my 6 year old camera is not doing that. If the Nikon is, maybe part of the problem is there. Or, it could just be the Nikon hardware sucks. The fact that the "museum" setting came out so noisy where as my old camera did just fine suggests that maybe the sensor in the Nikon is crap. Oh well, I don't make them so I'm just guessing.

Pocket Surface Tempature Reader

Maybe McDonalds needs to give these out to avoid lawsuits. It's a pocket surface tempature reader. Point it at your cup of coffee to check that it's not too hot.

Cordless Headphones

I'm a big fan of cordless headphones. I've had some since probably 1995. I don't remember if I originally got them for work or for home. I think it was for work. I found it annoying to use corded headphones and turn around or reach for something and trip over the wire or yank it out of the stereo or have the headphones yanked off my head.

Later, I got some for home. Since I left home I've always lived in an apartment so I can't crank the TV or stereo up at night to watch a movie. Wireless headphones made that problem go away and there were no wires to clean up. I can even walk to the kitchen late at night and still listen.

I think what happened after that, I had 1 pair at work and 1 at home. I moved to Japan and didn't bring them so I bought 2 more pairs, one for work, one for home. They were not that expensive. Maybe $60 each. Because they are infrared you can use as many headphones as you want with one transmitter so at some point I bought one more pair with no transmitter for home so me and a friend could watch late night action movies with loud sound without waking up the neighbors.

Eventually I got the 2 pair from the states back giving me a total of 5 pairs of cordless headphones!!!

Well, last week I just bought pair #6! The reason is as much as I liked the headphones, they were all the kind that go over your head. Meaning, if you have the kind any kind of hair style that requires you keep things off your head you are kind of out of luck. I tried just wrapping them around the back anyway but they are not designed for that and slide off all the time.

So, looking for a solution I found out here in Japan Sony has the MDR-IF50K. They work the same as all the others, infrared, but this time the receiver is a little separate base with a headphone socket so you can plug any headphones into it. It's not quite as convenient since you have to find a place to clip the receiver but now I can use any headphones including the kind you stick in your ears, the clipon kind, or the kind that wrap around the back of your head, in any case, not messing up my hair :-p

I should tell you, as far as I can tell, infrared cordless headphones are not super high fidelity. It's not a problem for me. I find them good enough but if you are more picky you might not. The new setup I just got means I can use any headphones but I suspect the issue is more of the infrared transmission, not the headphones. The other issue with them is you can only have one transmitter in an area. That means for example you can't have them and also the person sitting behind you at the office. The two transmitters will conflict. So far I've been lucky. As much as co-workers have liked them they haven't ever gone out and gotten their own. If they do I'll have to look for a new solution, at least for work. :-p

The Panasonic D-Snap AV30

Here's the lastest crazy gadget, the Panasonic D-Snap AV30.

It's this ittybitty still and movie camera thingy. It can record MPEG4 movies, upto 10 hours at 15 fps on a 512Meg SD card. It can take upto 14000 pictures on a 512Meg SD card. It's only 640x480 though and that's in high compression mode. You can use it to record analog video so you can for example copy some movies or TV programs to it to watch them later. It's got video out so you can watch it on a TV. It plays MP3s. And...It comes in 4 different colors.

Act now and you also get this free set of ginsu knives absolutely free! :-p.

The funny thing is it will only run for about 90 minutes while recording or playing back video and only 3 hours while playing back MP3s. What's the point?

Pictures from Cell!

You asked for it (not really) you got it. Just because I saw that somebody else had posted a month's worth of Casio Wristwatch Camera pictures I thought, what the heck, I'll post my Sharp SH-04 cell phone pictures.

Studying Japanese with WinCE

If you are serious about studying Japanese or plan on seriously studying Japanese you owe it to yourself to get a Windows CE palm-size PC or a Pocket PC so that you can study Kanji.

The Importance of Printer Paper

Did you know that selecting the right brand of printer paper can make a huge difference in the quality of your prints?

Nikon Super Coolscan LS-2000

Scanning 3600 slides with a Nikon Super Coolscan LS-2000

Sony DCR-PC100

My experience with the Sony DCR-PC100 video camera

Kodak DC210 Dark Photography Examples

Examples of low-light photographs on a Kodak DC210. They suck because the camera sucks.

The Sony DSC-F1 - Dark Digital Photography

Why is it that most digital camera suck at taking pictures in low-light conditions yet the Sony DSC-F1 works great (or at least okay)