Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Nikon USA has launched their own online store - which is an interesting move. I wasn't even aware that Canon had their own online store until I searched - my instinct is to always shop via online stores that I'm familiar with. I wonder why Nikon wants to compete with their channel partners that are selling the products?

"AVCHD from the Lumix cameras has several drawbacks IMHO. It is difficult to edit in most NLE programs unless transcoding into AVI, the compression leaves large areas such as grass patches rendered without detail and has a general overall soft quality. This sequence, directly shot to compare the quality of unadjusted clips from AVCHD and MJPEG, looks at static and dynamic images, closeup and distant images to get a comprehensive view of the results. The two formats were assembled into a 1280 x 720 50fps timeline and exported as a mpeg4 file."

I generally set my Panasonic cameras to record in AVCHD, but after watching this video and thinking about how I use the video clips, I'm going to change my cameras to use MJPEG. I tend to edit all my video clips, so for me it makes sense to capture clips with as little compression as possible - and that means MJPEG. I have 16 GB cards in my cameras, and haven't come close to running out of space yet, so I'm not concerned with the added storage MJPEG takes up. If you're someone that tends not to edit your clips and just saves them as-is, AVCHD might make more sense. What video format do you use on your digital camera?

Above: starting in the middle and going 'round, that's a Nikon D300, Panasonic GF1, Panasonic TS1, Flip Mino HD, Panasonic ZS3, Kodak EasyShare M1093 IS, and a Nikon D5000. I took this photo with my HTC HD2.

I have to admit that since the birth of my son, I've become a bit of a camera whore enthusiast - I just can't seem to have enough cameras with the right features in the right places to capture all his cuteness. Yes, I'm a completely biased father, but comon', this is one cute kid. ;-) Not shown in this picture are my Canon HF100 and Canon G1 video cameras (the latter I haven't used in a couple of years) - and I also forgot to include my Canon SD870 because it was tucked away in a container below one of my monitors. Yeah, I have a lot of cameras. The question is, am I using all of them? For the most part, yes. Read more...

"Mississauga, ON, February 2, 2010 - Nikon Canada today introduced eight new COOLPIX cameras to its popular line-up of compact digital cameras, including one Performance-series, four Style-series and three Life-series cameras. Nikon continues to lead innovation in the ever-evolving categories of compact digital cameras as demonstrated with the introduction of a CMOS sensor and 26x optical zoom lens into its flagship Performance-series COOLPIX P100. Nikon has also equipped five of its new COOLPIX cameras across all three series with HD movie capabilities, making creating and sharing memories fun and easy. Elegantly designed compact cameras in vibrant must-have colours to suit personal style are a hallmark of the COOLPIX line, including the new COOLPIX S8000, COOLPIX S6000, COOLPIX S4000, COOLPIX S3000, COOLPIX L22 and COOLPIX L21. Additionally, the new COOLPIX L110 offers 15x super zoom and HD video recording with stereo sound and easy shooting versatility."

Nikon has kicked out a boatload of new cameras, and they've done it at 11pm Eastern Time. It's time for me to head to bed you see, so rather than giving you analysis of what Nikon has released, I'm going to say that the most noteworthy thing I see here is that Nikon is finally offering point and shoot cameras with 720p video - meaning they've caught up to what Panasonic and others were doing in 2008. I'm a huge fan of Nikon DSLRs, but when it comes to their point and shoot cameras, historically they haven't been on the cutting edge. This group of new cameras looks like it's competitive with what's out there now. What do you think? Am I missing anything? Do any of these cameras stand out to you?

The remainder of the press release is after the break, along with a couple of other images. Read more...

I was posting about Pocket PC Thoughts' 8th anniversary today, and courtesy of Archive.org - I'm so grateful those guys do what they do - I saw this post I made back in October of 2000:

"Imagine a digital camera running Windows CE. Imagine snapping pictures and having them automatically emailed to you via a Bluetooth chip on the camera that talks to your cell phone on your hip. Storage becomes a thing of the past - the CF card in the camera is more of a buffer for your cell phone than anything else. Or imagine having a built-in FTP program that would automatically push your images up to a web site as you're shooting them - real-time photography and events coverage could usher in a new era of photo journalism. Raw, unedited, up to the second coverage. Imagine having Pocket Artist on your camera - you could crop, edit, and tweak your images before uploading/emailing them. The possibilities are so endless here - if anyone has any upper-management contacts with Kodak, Olymus, Nikon, or any other major digital camera OEM, tell them I want to speak to them."

I thought that was interesting for a couple of reasons. First, because eight years later, we still don't have cameras with rich operating systems supporting third-party software applications for - although we do have some cameras that can do WiFi directly off the camera itself, and of course we have hardware such as the Eye-Fi. We have some DSLRs with expensive add-ons to provide WiFi, but virtually no cameras that bridge into PDAs or smartphones. Read more...