With Maya dropping their price to $1999 from $7999 it was only a matter of time for Softimage to follow suit. Softimage 3D is now $1495.. That's $500 less than Maya and $100 less than Lightwave!!!
It will be interesting to see how Lightwave and 3D Studio Max respond. Max positioned itsself as the best relatively low−price solution at $3500. Now Max is suddenly the highest priced solution. Lightwave was an even lower cost solution and is now about the same price.
Sony just released this new Itty Bitty Vaio. It's WAY TOO SMALL. It seems like it would be hard to use but it's cute being so small.
Sony has a new high end notebook out with a 16.1 inch 1600x1200 display, 1.7gig P4, 512meg ram, and an ATI Radeon 7500 3D graphics card so it probably does descent 3D. Cool!
But more interesting to me is that it comes bundled with Lightwave Express, a 3D graphics program and they are advertising that fact. I'm surprised coming bundled with a 3D package is considered a draw. Maybe the point is something like *Hey look!, This machine is big enough, fast enough to run 3D Software!*
I just saw this new graphics tablet except it's not a tablet at all. It's a little widget about size of a 9v battery and a special pen. The pen is an actual ball point pen. You take any piece of paper you want, clip the gadget at the top left corner of the paper and then draw on the paper and what you draw appears on the screen. No idea how well it works but it's supposed to be less than $100 when they come out.
They showed a huge ink jet printer on TV with a difference. It doesn't just print on paper. It prints on almost anything. The news reporter stuck in a astroturf doormat and printed the TV station logo on it. Yes, directly on the 1/4 inch long plastic grass. They also showed example of printing on dinner plates, a pane of glass, and other stuff. It's not the kind of thing the average person could buy but it's likely to be available at least at service bureaus.
I saw two pretty cool looking books today that made me wonder if things are changing for Maya. The first is called Maya Illuminated: Games and it appeared to be a very detailed and illustrated book about making low polygon artwork for real time 3D games in Maya. The second is this one called The Art of Maya and to be honest, from the cover I thought it was a coffee table book full of fullpage pictures of scenes of computer generated movie scenes but that's not what it is at all. Instead it's a highly detailed and illustrated book about how the computer graphics in the latest movies were made in Maya.
I saw this PDA at Sakuraya yesterday. It's special feature is that it has a 640 by 480 display. That's at least 4 times what any other PDA has. That does make it of course larger than other PDA but it's not all that much larger. It would probaby still fit in most pockets.
I saw this Sony set top PC today at Sakuraya. It's a PC meant to be put under the TV. Acutally, it comes with a display. It's clearly meant for the Japanese market as I suspect most American's wouldn't want a 15 inch display for their living room TV. I'm not sure it was 15 inches but I'm sure it was not 20.
Last week I was in Tokyo's Akihabara, the place for geeks like me to get my tech fix and I noticed there was a new store opening up in a few days called "Linux Cafe" so I went back today (after it opened, to check it out).