I am quite interested in stereoscopic media, and I have been so for a very long time. Even then I have not yet ventured into the field of content creation, but I have plans! To soothe my fascination with S3D pictures and video I put down an order for the Aiptek 3D i2 as soon as it came in stock, this because it is a very economical purchase, at least compared to the Fujifilm Real 3D W1 which I will mention further down.
The i2 camera showed up a few days later and I went to pick it up. It did feel a bit plasticky but not totally bad. It was already getting dark outside as I had spent the day out of town so when tried it and noticed a very sluggish framerate I assumed it might need a bright sunlit day to work properly. This was very positive thinking on my part, but I had a tiny suspicion.
The morning after me and the 3D camera went out into the brilliant sunshine, and to my dismay the camera still recorded a stuttering video just like the day before. Sure it has two very small lenses and it is a cheap brand, but the specifications says 720p in 30fps, so I was quite disappointed! I decided to check how low the frame rate actually was. Back at my computer I took a closer look at the recorded video files. The camera sure saved in 30 fps, but many of the frames were the same, making it appear to have a much lower frame rate at playback! When I ran it through a video converter it reported how many unique and total frames it had: 136 unique frames out of 1360 frames in total. That is only 10%! This means the effective frame rate is 3fps instead of 30 fps! This of course was unacceptable and it had me promptly putting that test video on Youtube. To see it in the 3D player you need to click over to the site.
Of course I deemed the product to not represent what was advertised and I asked if I could return it. I got to pay for shipping it back as it was not broken, just not up to spec, and now they have finally approved a buyback so I will get my money back! I still ended up a bit unhappy as I was naively thinking (even though I knew Aiptek to be a low quality brand) that I would get a nice solution for spontaneous S3D content creation. Apparently it was not to be!
Update: For your reference I have also attached a few pictures taken with it. The noise levels in a dark room are quite horrible, but not as apparent here as I have scaled the images down. In daylight it actually works as well as my digital camera from six years ago, except that each image gets slightly different color, you can easily see this in the road picture.
About the Fujifilm Real 3D W1; I was very hyped for this product when it was first announced but as it was quite expensive and practically impossible to find in a store for testing I did not spontaneously buy it. I finally did get a hands on experience at a photographic fair, and even though it’s a solid piece of hardware I am still not buying it. This mostly because the 3D screen does not work well for me at all; it works by shifting the display back and forth beneath a parallax barrier so each eye gets 30 fps60 flickering Hz individually. A static parallax barrier display would probably be more comfortable due to the light being constant. Also, the buttons to control it are very unintuitive as they have two commands and you have to tilt them one way or the other, all of them. I really liked the general concept but I wish Fujifilm would make a revised model with a different screen, new interface and buttons and a better movie mode. And to keep the price down they could also skip the optical zoom as it probably messes up the baseline anyway. That’s what I think!
I have never been much of a Christmas decorator. Last year I bought a few metal stars to hang in my windows but otherwise I have almost nothing. This year I noticed a computer Christmas decoration contest over at Sweclockers.com, sponsored by Alina Systems. As I dislike my computer pretty much and the prize was a crazy machine it was not hard to decide to participate. I began looking for decorative items a week or so prior to actually trying my hand at it. In total I went to three shops to get everything I figured I could have use for. Then after the Christmas craze I spent a day decorating, shooting and de-decorating my computer space, on the 26th. I had a vague plan in my head so I went at it without hesitation, but much was made up on the go. You can see a time-lapse of the process and the end result in the video below.
Here is a detailed list of what items I used for my decoration.
Previously owned:
2x small metal stars with bulbs inside
3x extension power cords
3x power strips of different sizes
3x rolls of masking tape with different widths
Roll of yellow string
Battery powered RGB LED figure; inside the gingerbread house
Smoke machine; to add some atmosphere
Winter themed candle holder with four red cups with lit candles in them
Christmas crib with Joseph, Mary, Baby Jesus, three wise men, shepherd, three sheep, a cow and mule and a well.
Electrically lit church
Electrically lit poinsettia
Embroidery saying “God Helg” (Happy Holiday)
Gingerbread house
Programmable LED sign saying “GOD JUL!” (Merry Christmas)
Borrowed from a friend:
Real live Christmas tree with decorations and lights
As you might have noticed in the video I removed it all the same night, mostly as the heat from the lights were undoing the masking tape that held them in place, and melting the chocolate figures, so it was all falling apart anyway. The result of the contest as not been published yet so there is nothing to report on that front. I’m not even sure if my entry is even considered as I freely interpreted “decorate your computer” into the entire computer space, and really, the computer alone was not roomy enough!
Update: Longplay won the contest with his gingerbread creation :) Well deserved I have to say. I wish I had been less stressed out so I could have been more creative, this time around I got to rely on the overkill-spam tactic, which apparently did not work :x I will try to keep this in mind for future entries, meaning more planning and probably less work!
Update2: Hah! Apparently I got a posting over at the site, awesome! ^_^ Oh, and with that link I just created an infinite Internet loop.
I decided to get a new camera as my old camera was becoming glitchy and awfully worn. Like normal I set up a large table of models I were interested in and weighted the pros. and cons. that were apparent. Then I spend time reading reviews and looking for sample images for the top models I picked. Finally I go to a store to actually hold one and optimally get to try it out. Sadly for the store I was at they only had the display camera left, and I would not get a rebate on it, so I checked around in other stores but finally ordered it online, like with most other things I buy.
As you might have figured out I bought the Casio Exilim EX-FC100. Above I said I read a few reviews before getting this camera, and as I have used it for a month I figured I wanted to post one myself detailing my experience. Most of the things I comment on is naturally in comparison to my older and smaller Canon Ixus 75, and in reality I am not sure if you can call this a real review, but at least it will give you some idea of what I find good or bad. If you do wonder about camera or why I bought it that I have not mentioned you can leave a comment and I will try to answer :)
Out of the cameras I looked at I picked this one because of…
High-speed functions
Image stabilization
HD movie support
Better zoom
Competitive price point
Extras I found interesting…
A number of playful Best Shot settings, like Move In, Move Out, Multi Motion, HS-Night scene etc.
High resolution snapshots while recording in HD/STD.
Focus tracking, it is flimsy in low light situations but fun when it works.
You can zoom while playing back videos, and play them backwards or step frames! (awesome!)
Things I like…
The yellow ring around the optics… yes I mention it.
The flash is a distance from the optics, not completely flattening out images when using it.
Flash intensity can be adjusted.
Manual focus, though it is a bit hard to use in low light situations due to the noise level in the zoomed area on the screen.
Optical image stabilization.
High speed video recording.
High speed burst shooting.
Ease of access for exposure adjustments.
Overall the menu interface is very quickly to access and easy to use. It did not take long for me to feel natural changing settings even though I swapped to a different brand camera.
Things I do not like very much…
The [Slow] button is pretty useless. It is easy to access, but lacks utility. It can only save one picture from the burst you recorded, so it feels more logical to use the continuous shoot mode where you can pick all of them if you want. The only reason it could be useful is because it has its’ own settings.
It uses a USB cable for communication but the camera port is proprietary.
White Balance messes with my head. Sometimes when using the screen as a viewfinder and the white balance looks great the resulting picture can still get tinted blue or red, not at all looking like what I expected, which is a bit discomforting. My guess is post processing of contrast, color etc.
I am wondering how dust proof this camera is. My old one has been in on so many adventures it is stupid, and has no dust inside the screen. Only after a few weeks this camera has a big speck of dust inside the screen making it look like a dead pixel when turned on. I guess it might come from the factory? If not I do not expect a long life for this camera.
Sometimes when I have just turned on the camera and it has not charged the flash and I press the shutter button it will act like it is taking a picture, blanking the screen, but it actually does not! There is no image saved.
Things I would like updated or added in a new firmware release…
HD movie recording has fixed focal ranges completely ignoring where you set the auto focus. Let us use the auto-focus for all video modes.
When using the 30-210 fps video mode there is no sound recorded when filming in 30 fps, which drags down the value of that function. It is still useful as you avoid any lag when switching to high speed, which is very nice.
Switching to continuous shooting mode resets my focus area setting, setting it on spot instead of tracking.
Add more options for the left/right buttons. Focus, AF Area, Flash intensity. It would also be nice to have separate functions for left and right.
When retracting the lens it now zooms out and then retracts. It feels like both things should be possible to do at once, like on my old camera, to decrease the time it takes for the optics to retract. Now I wonder if it is really shutting down as the zooming out is internal and thus is a bit hard to notice from behind the camera.
The optics retract too quickly, after just ten seconds, when reviewing what you captured. It feels a bit pointless when it retracts just before you planned to take the next picture, it has happened to me several times. A small increase to 15 seconds would work for me! Make it a setting!
A time-lapse or sequential exposure mode. Really, it is awesome fun and should be included in every camera. This hardware might be focused on high speed, but I would rather have it be a general time modification camera where time-lapse would be an obvious inclusion!
In addition to Move in and Move out triggers, add a sound trigger, as the camera has a built in mike and pre-record features it is a sealed deal already!
I want exposure bracketing on all my cameras…
Things I would have revised before releasing a new camera hardware iteration…
Rethink the need of two mode buttons for review and record. A single button for toggling review would suffice and generate less confusion. Now there are three buttons with which to turn the camera on! You can deactivate the possibility to turn on the camera with the mode buttons, but then you cannot boot the camera in review mode.
Definitely move “DISP” off of the directional pad, or make it harder to depress. It is easy to toggle by mistake. A suggestions would be to replace the red record mode button with it. (see above)
Use a standard mini-USB port, proprietary ports are a pain.
Change the knob on the zoom so it does not stand out so much from the body. Right now it is not very pocket friendly.
The buttons feel a bit flimsy and plasticky.
The lanyard was way too short for my own hands, I had to use the one from my old camera.
The battery hatch has a weird plastic locking mechanism, it makes it overly complicated to get the hatch closed again, but I guess it is safe?
The memory card is hard to remove due to it being right next to the hatch hinge.
The battery is spring loaded, but the spring is so weak that I still have to fiddle with the battery to get it out.
My most common settings, Focus and Flash modes, have no quick buttons. See firmware suggestion.
If you add a time-lapse mode also add support for an AC power supply.
Notes on how to use the camera for greater enjoyment…
Learn how to cut movies on the camera to save space, just press down on the directional pad in a paused clip. This is especially useful with highspeed clips with a long lead time. Beware though that this changes the timestamp for your movie!
To use your own focal point when recording HD/STD video you need to change the focusing mode to manual after auto focusing or else it will switch to the fixed focal points. Naturally you can also set the focal point directly in the manual mode.
To avoid getting kicked out of the menu when saving settings with SET, just press left on the directional pad instead and you will save that setting and end up in the menu again! If you are in a sub menu, like language settings, you can exit to the menu by pressing the menu button. I actually saw this as a complaint in several reviews before I bought the camera, which makes me wonder how much detail they go into when reviewing.
Am I still happy that I bought this camera?
Oh yes. I have had a great time so far with the high speed features, it is very interesting to record whatever you come across in slow motion to see if you can find details you otherwise would not have noticed! A very nice thing to experiment with if you get bored anywhere :) It also feels fresh to always carry a camera that can record in 720p. Sure there are a bunch of things I would have done differently, but right now I do not develop or manufacture cameras, and nothing so far is a deal breaker.
The image stabilization and larger zoom gives the camera more versatility than my old one. You can set the stabilization in demo mode to see what difference it makes, and I have to say that I am not buying another camera without it. Which makes me ponder if I should replace my E-410 body with one from the E-500 series…
The Exilim is actually not that much larger than my old camera, it still fits into my old camera bag without problems. It is not as slimmed as it has things protruding from the chassis while my Ixus pretty much is a metal box with flat sides.
I still have many things I want to try with this camera but high speed photography and video recording requires a lot of light and as it is dark during my spare time now when we are nearing the winter I am pondering to invest in some lights…
You will see images and videos from this camera on this blog in the future, as it has replaced my Ixus as the camera I always carry with me, as a starter I am embedding a street performance a friend did a while ago recorded solely on this camera, also available at YouTube.com. The HD footage is a bit shaky as I recorded it while zoomed, but it is watchable.
I went together with a whole lot of teenagers on a Church Skiing camp this February. It was a tremendous amount of fun with a lot of social activities and, of course, skiing. I am not going to spend very much time describing what happened, but instead focus on pictures and video footage.
Last year I had a camera that I mounted on my person. This year I had bought a new cheap camera with better video capabilities, a Kodak EasyShare 570, and spent a lot of time prior to the trip making a bag for it so it too could be mounted.
I bumped into a problem though, this camera was extremely sensitive to snow and water, dampness in general. The previous camera would survive pretty much anything, as you could see in my previous skiing post, but this one died or started malfunctioning as soon as a few snowflakes touched it!
Naturally it was a big disappointment and I lost a few days of filming, the first day was too cold and the second I had to get the camera dry after filling it with snow, but it was alright when I tried it back where we stayed. I ended up holding the camera in my right hand while skiing so often the footage would get quite jumpy when there was action making it not very watchable!
All in all I recorded two hours of snow fun, the problem was piecing together a video as everything looked the same (snow and trees), so it was not a small task to pinpoint interesting things. I had to watch the entire thing and mark out points of interest, this without total silence except the video audio as I needed to hear what was said which made it quite boring! Like watching a movie without music. Still, it becomes easier to condense the footage if you space out the editing because on every occasion I have opened the project I cut away things that then seem uninteresting. I repeated this a bunch of times during nine months since the camp and finally there was a video ready, this one clocking in at almost six minutes! You can either watch it over at Youtube.com or play it embedded below. Enjoy :)
Update: I noticed that embeds does not get included in the email updates, I will make sure to add normal links to future posts… as this edit will not be included in the email, heh.
Today is the one year anniversary of me cutting my own fingers with a very sharp bread knife. Below is a small reflection on how things have been, are just now and will be in the future.
The fingers have healed up nicely so you can only see thin scars by now. I only recently noticed the subtle scars from the stitching, looks a bit frankensteinish!
Scarring is only cosmetic though, the real damage is the nerve damage. The status there is almost unchanged. Even if the scars might be less touchy now I still get jolts of pain from direct pressure on the them, it happens when gripping metal cutlery in a bad way or grabbing a thin door handle, very often metal objects. I say jolts because each time it happens I flinch so the pressure and pain is removed, it reminds of of the jolts you get when you hit your elbow nerve.
When I have used my hands to carry heavy things with a tight grip, which naturally exposes the inside of my fingers to high pressure over time, I have experienced the sensation of heat, wetness, cold and other tactile feedback which is mismatched to the real life situation. My fingers also stay tingly for some time after putting down whatever I carried.
Both my fingers are still numb, meaning reduced sense of touch and other sensory input, all the way from the cuts to the tip, with the sensation that they are half asleep. Maybe a little less numb than before, but not so much different.
The doctor told me that the nerve damage could heal in a year or two, or never. As I have not experienced any real improvement in one full year I am suspecting my fingers will stay like this for a really long time, most likely, which is something I actually have come to terms with.
Incredibly I managed to cut myself in such an angle that the sides of my fingers that touch the keyboard when I am typing still behave like normal, the nerve damage did not reach there. Actually when I think about it, it makes me feel very lucky. The same angle also saved my tendons, which I have been told are hard to heal properly as well as being painful, even though I pushed the knife down to the bone.
I am quite interested in stereoscopic media, and I have been so for a very long time. Even then I have not yet ventured into the field of content creation, but I have plans! To soothe my fascination with S3D pictures and video I put down an order for the Aiptek 3D i2 as soon as it came in stock, this because it is a very economical purchase, at least compared to the Fujifilm Real 3D W1 which I will mention further down.
