I have just heard about a new professional Sony camcorder, not much information has been released yet but it seems to be a solid state version of the Z5 HDV camcorder, and I’m extremely pleased to see that it records to Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo rather than the very expensive XDCAM EX cards. The format goes under the name of NXCAM, which from what I can make out seems to be a new name for their consumer AVCHD format but they have just increased the bit rate from 16Mbps to 24Mbps. It’s a product that I’m actually very excited about and I can see it being a very popular product, possibly more popular then the Sony Z1 was.

As of yet the only available information is from Sony Japan, you can view the translated page here.

EDIT1: More information here

Having not looked at camcorder technology for a good while I have to say I was extremely disappointed today when I saw Sony’s current consumer line. They have pretty much discontinued their HDV camcorders to which I’m now willing to accept, AVCHD isn’t too bad to edit now that high performance processors have come down in price. Unfortunately though it seems Sony are going back to their old ways of not putting external microphone jacks onto consumer grade camcorders.

At the time of writing there is not one Sony solid state AVCHD camcorder that gives the option of an external microphone jack, my guess is that Sony want to sell more of their silly hot shoe microphones. I highly doubt that they are doing it to sell more professional camcorders, especially with the difference in price being at least £4000 – £6000 for a professional solid state camcorder.

It’s pretty common these days for consumer grade camcorders to be used in professional production environments, you see them used in broadcast all the time, for instance there used in Mythbusters, Survivorman, Bear Grylls, Deadliest Catch and many more. Even if a production had unlimited funds it’s not always practical to use professional camcorders, they can be too big and heavy for certain applications. So it’s not unreasonable for Sony to at least produce one solid state camcorder with a microphone jack!

First of all I would like to make it clear that I have nothing against Canon, I think they make great products but I generally prefer Sony due to the NP-FH batteries and “Night Shot” mode and honestly I think Sony has a little better build quality. However I’m pretty sure Sony will be losing a lot of its current HC7 / HC9 market share to Canon’s LEGRIA HF range.

So in the off chance that someone from Sony’s R&D team are reading this, please make at least one solid state camcorder with external microphone and headphone jacks!

A while back I posted HD Camcorders and Silly Formats in which I mentioned the HVR-DR60 & HVR-MRC1K HDD / CF recorders for HDV camcorders. Unfortunately these are very expensive units and are far out of the budget range for the average consumer. However after posting about the Lenovo S10E it suddenly occurred to me that this netbook would make an ideal direct to disk recorder with a couple upgrades and the addition of a Firewire Expresscard. Though I have not personally tried it, this netbook should be more then capable of capturing a single HDV feed.
Lenovo IdeaPad S10E £279.99
Crucial 2GB, DDR2 PC2-5300 Memory Module £19.54
Seagate ST9320421AS 320GB Momentus 7200RPM 16MB 2.5″ HDD £63.23
Belkin USB 2.0 and FireWire ExpressCard £56.33
So for a total of £419.09 you’ve got a hard disk recorder, with the bonus of a decent size preview monitor. Obviously the recording time is limited by the battery life of the netbook, though you can get additional batteries or power it externally. Also not to forget, you’ve also got a fully functional netbook out of it too.

When Asus introduced the 7″ netbook back in 2007, there was much doubt from competing notebook manufacturers that there was a market for such a “toy” of a notebook. Well how wrong they were, ever since, the popularity of netbooks has been on a constant increase and now everybody’s at it. The netbook market has had huge impacts on sales of  notebook computers, especially expensive ultra portables.

Though it’s now old news I have just discovered that Lenovo has a netbook, Which i’m really pleased with since ive been a big fan of IBM & Lenovo Thinkpads. They’ve called it the Lenovo IdeaPad S10e, I’m really impressed with its features especially considering its price, at the time of writing its £279.99 from Dabs.

It main features:
Intel Atom N270
1GB of RAM (512MB + 512MB) 1.5GB Max since one is soldered.
160GB 5400rpm SATA HDD
10.1″ TFT 1024×576 Display & 1.3MP Webcam
100mb NIC
Wireless B/G
Bluetooth
ExpressCard/34 Slot
4 in 1 Card Reader (SD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard)
Windows XP Home

My favoroute feature has to be the ExpressCard/34 expansion slot, as far as im aware the only other netbook to feature one is the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini. I have a bad history of snapping USB accessories off from notebook computers so prefer to go with a much stronger expresscard if possible.

I was looking at flash memory yesterday and was fascinated by the differing price between different flash technologies, for instance if you were to purchase a 32GB Compact Flash card, which at the time of writing is around £140 for a Sandisk branded one, yet you can get a 32GB OCZ USB flash drive for £60 or even a 64GB one for £110!I seriously doubt it’s because of the performance, there probably both roughly the same, I also doubt that it’s a physical size issue as if you’ve ever opened up a USB flash drive you will find the flash memory is smaller then a compact flash card anyway.

Is it supply and demand? Maybe, I can only speculate, but I can’t imagine the demand for large USB flash drives being as high as the demand for large Compact Flash cards that are used all around the world by professional photographers and video production companies alike.

So why do large capacity Compact Flash cards seem so behind USB Flash memory?

It’s not that often that a manufacturer releases a product that gets me excited, the way technology is advancing nothing is coming as a surprise to me these days. However today when I came across the new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T90 I was quite surprised with its features, the camera starts shipping mid April at a RRP of £280. It measures just W93.6xH57.2xD15mm and it features 12.1 Megapixels, 4x Optical Zoom, 720p HD Video and a 16:9 3″ LCD Screen. The bit that got me excited was the 720p 9Mbps HD video, obviously it’s not going to be the best quality video in the world but I’m sure it will out perform many AVCHD camcorders that are out there, 1280×720 9Mbps video is just outstanding for the cameras size.

Due to how compact this camera is, I would highly consider carrying it pretty much everywhere with me, as much as you say you’ve got a camera on your mobile phone, it’s crap, and always will be, the day there is a good phone camera on the market, it will be a camera with a built in phone, not a phone with a built in camera!

I’ve been a fan of Sony’s Cyber-shot cameras for years now, pretty much everyone that’s asked me for camera advice for a compact camera has gone out and bought a Sony Cyber-shot, there great value for money and very reliable.

A bit of an update from the previous post about modifying my Leatherman Wave multi-tool, I have decided not to go ahead with a modification because the blade is quite loose without the lock and it will end up being quite dangerous and difficult to use. I posted a thread on the Bushcraft UK Forums about what I was planning to do and plenty of people thankfully talked me out if it. You can view the thread I started here if you want to have a read.

So now what are my options? Well I could of course continue to use the Leatherman Wave for EDC regardless and hope that if stopped by a police officer he has some common sense and lets me go on my way. Or of course there is the safe option of replacing it with a non locking knife.

Since I lack confidence that most police offers have common sense I’m going to go with the safe option and eventually find something to replace the Leatherman.

Ok so its personal rant time, last year I purchased a Leatherman Wave multi-tool with intent to have it as an EDC (Every Day Carry) knife, I knew that to be legal it had to be Under 3 inches, fair enough i thought, a 3 inch blade is adequate for most tasks. The Leatherman Wave is just under 3 inches, perfect knife for EDC.

Well thats what I thought anyway, I’m not one for reading news but m increasingly aware of the media talking about knife crime whilst listening to Radio 1. I decided to look up the exact law on them and then came to realise that my EDC knife was infact illegal.

Our law states that an EDC knife has to be under 3 inches, folding, and non locking. Bugger! Now why the hell does it make any difference! You could kill a person with any size blade and with a folding knife. So why can’t you have a locking one?

What our thick goverment does’t seem to understand, If somebody is going to stab someone, they dont give a shit about the law in the first place, And they have to have the will to be able to do it. It’s the person thats the problem not the blade, You could stab somone with a chop stick. Infact, I believe the majority of stabbings that occure are from a £1 kitchen knife from a supermarket.

So now I need to find a way of modifying my Leatherman to make it non-locking. I will probably update about how I do it.

Ok so just 12 days after blogging about the reliability of the Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB drive (which can be found here), Western Digital have announced their new 2TB Caviar Green drive. You can find a pretty extensive review / preview of it here at RegHardware.

I’ve had some bad experience with Western Digital in the past, but when this drive gets released at a sensible price, I may just give them another try! There has also been issues in the past with putting WD Green drives into large RAID arrays on certain controllers so it will be interesting to see if the same problems crop up with this drive.

Well that’s an easy question; the answer is obviously online backup services. Or is it? With the current upload speeds on home cable & ADSL broadband connections online backup services are only practical if your producing lets say 10 – 30GB of data per month. But what about for those who are constantly generating in the region of 100GB+ per month?

I personally have 2TB of storage on various hard drives and my file server, which is constantly full, and also constantly changing. Unfortunately I’m on ADSL with just 256kbps of upload bandwidth, and to upload the current 2TB would take approximately 26 months, by which time I’d probably have easily generated another 2TB of content! So online backup in my case is just not an option. So what about external hard drives? Well to me, an external hard drive just isn’t a backup; it’s too easy to damage the drive when the time comes that you actually need it, for example dropping it.

Of course, CD / DVD / Blu-Ray and USB flash drives are out of the question either because of the quantity required or the price. So what do I use? Call me old fashioned but I’m using a SCSI LTO 1 tape drive, it was cheap (second hand) its reasonably fast at 15MB a second and each tape can hold 100GB (200GB compressed) I just simply span the data over multiple tapes. Obviously I could get an LTO4 drive which can store 800/1600GB but it also costs a lot more.

The day that online backup becomes convenient for everybody will be the day the ISP’s introduce broadband packages with a decent upload, which I don’t see happening in the UK for a long time!