Cool Design and gadgets Lastest news*: Projector

11/15/2012

Projector - stunned. Amazed. Blown away

Wow what a great camera! I haven't used a dedicated vid cam from Sony in years. I have been using the HD video capture capabilities of my Sony Digi Cams like my awesome Sony Cybershot DSC-HX100V. Let's do the pros and cons here:

Pros:

Projector - stunned. Amazed. Blown away. I thought this would be a gimmicky feature but it works amazingly well. We took the dog for a long walk after unpacking this & shot some footage. That night I projected it on the wall and the kids were boggled to see themselves and the dog projected in 10 foot high! I completely get why Sony added this. The bane of all vid cameras has always been "how" do you quickly show footage to friends & family. In the past you had awkward cables or some IR beaming tool, etc.. always a pain. No longer, you want to see our trip to the zoo? Dim the lights and look on the wall over there. Just... wow. I am trying to figure out how to add my own tv videos to a memory card and project them!

Form factor - Sony has always had great design. This little baby fits snug in the palm of your hand easily. There is a brilliantly hidden usb cable in the wrist strap for connecting to a computer. No more hunting for that darm cable. You can tell they really thought this out. The lens cover automatically opens and closes whenever you open the LCD panel and there is no power button, you just open & close the LCD panel and start shooting. Very smart.

Quality of Video: fantastic. It's really as good as you could hope. Low light is very decent also. There is no light but frankly, footage shot with a tiny light bulb or LED never looks good anyways. Still photo quality is sorta grainy but it's nice to have.

Media & Storage: it has 16gb of built in storage which is quite a lot, several hours of video, 2-4 hours depending on your setting. You can also pop in an SD card & record hours and hours more. I would highly recommend getting a 32gb SD card (amazon basics has a nice one) and then you don't have to connect the camera to your computer, just insert the SD card.

Cons:

Sadly this awesome camera has a big flaw for mac users. It's a real PITA to get the highest quality footage over to the mac. The HQ video mode is not compatible with the mac without some hassling. The HQ mode is the default shooting mode and its really what you want to be using. It gives you the highest, best frame rate. You have to adjust down to FH or Standard quality to get iMovie or FInal Cut to recognize the video. Also iPhoto won't import the video files but iMovie will.

In the end, I had to play with Handbrake, a free video converter tool, to find a setting that would convert the HQ video to something the Apple software would recognize. Sony ships free Windows software with the camera to let you edit these video files, but they don't offer any mac software. There is a note on the online support docs that says "HQ video not compatible with Apple". Basically you have to change the setting to SD (standard) which is a lot lower res (or convert your HQ video with something like Handbrake). No where in the sales documentation does it say the HQ mode isn't mac compatible.

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Cool Design and gadgets Lastest news*

11/15/2012

Projector - stunned. Amazed. Blown away

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