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Indie article - December 2004: Feature on Christmasy gadgets - Shocking Thrillers.
It’s the season of good will to all men. All too often that good will can manifest itself as socks, aftershave and jumpers knitted by your mum that’d embarrass an eight year old. At the same time, the joy of owning a PC is the myriad things you can do with one. Combine these with the fact that in recent years a whole new gamut of exciting products and electrifying possibilities has emerged and you have all the ingredients of a perfect blokes Crimbo. So please allow me to suggest some computer-friendly gadgets you should be stocking (geddit?) this festive yuletide.
Kicking off with digital camcorders doesn’t mean fiddly tapes and IEEE1394 ports. There’s a load of cute little memory-card based cameras around now, many of which are worthy of your attention. At the fancy-pants end of the spectrum is the Sanyo’s ‘cameracorder’ - the DMX-C4 that replaces the DMX-C1 you might have seen. The only difference is the newer model is a little heavier at 178g ready to film, the 1.8” LCD screen is a little bigger and brighter… you get the picture. A 5.8x optical zoom, true 4Mp CCD, 30fps VGA output and a full set of still camera features (multi-mode flash, 2 & 10 second self timer, etc.) and a stereo mic. make this a proper bobby dazzler. The SD media used can hold 30 minutes of DVD quality Mpeg-4 video on a 512Mb card - and twice that on a 1Gb one. Lower the quality down to VHS standards and you can double those times, which again makes this mobile phone-sized gizmo a very powerful movie-making tool.
JVC make a couple of more traditionally comcorderesque devices called Everio. The upright version is called the GZ-MC100 and it’s very adorable and thoroughly lifestyle. The more cube-like GZ-MC200, which also uses Mpeg-2 encoding to record video onto either an SD or CF card, or the more capacious MicroDrive. 4Gb storage means no shortage of space but stills performance is limited by the 2.12Mp CCD, which gives ‘mere’ 1600x1200 (1.92Mp) output. It also features a useful 10x optical zoom (again, more like a regular camcorder) plus a less practical 200x digital zoom. USB2 in/output makes life easy for those not blessed with a Firewire socket and you’re still able to plug it straight into a TV (or VCR/recordable DVD) with the included AV cables. At 355g it’s more of a beast than the Samsung but a better alternative to regular mini-DV tape camcorders.
More basic versions are available from the likes of Mustek and Goodmans but along with a lower price expect much more basic features (especially on the stills-camera side) and rather less polished presentation. On the up side, most will also let you use them as voice recorders, MP3 players and external USB2 hard-drives, which leads me neatly into…
…Personal Digital Media Centres. With 20Gb+ small-format hard drives getting as cheap as chips (actually much cheaper, Gig-for-gig storage-wise) and LCD screens becoming stupidly inexpensive it was only a matter of time before someone stuck the two together to make an amazingly compact and versatile pocket-sized gizmo. French firm Archos were probably the first to market with an all-singing, all-dancing product that you could hook stills-n-video camera, TV receiver, card-reader or FM radio modules to. That’s in addition to it being a video recorder (up to 400 hours on the 100Gb version) with a self-timer, an MP3 player with enough storage to hold 500 CDs worth of music… I could go on. Again, there are other cheaper models with fewer optional extras, smaller screens or less storage available. The Mustek PVR-A1 is a good example. It has with only 32Mb as standard, but the SD slot will take a 1Gb card. The 2.5” TFT screen is all you really need if it’s a personal device and while the earphones shipped with it are as basic as basic can be, there is a small built-in speaker for you to watch The Matrix Reloaded with a friend. The AV-in socket allows you record straight from the TV or other video source and it ships with a DC adaptor/charger to let you do this without flattening the battery. One gripe people seem to have with it is file names only get eight letters, which can make finding the tune you want a problem. However, for £120ish retail, what do they expect? It might be Christmas but that doesn’t mean miracles! Another name to watch in this market is the Zen from Creative. It’s a Game Boy Advance-sized PMP (Portable Media Player) built around a 20 or 40Gb drive and a 3.8” screen. The shots I’ve seen of it remind me of the Lynx but I’m sure Creative have learned from Atari’s marketing mistakes.
Not everyone chooses to lug a potentially fragile HDD/big LCD combo around, especially if they want to skateboard down flights of steps while listening to the Ride of the Valkyries (as I do), which is where your basic pocket MP3 player comes in. A 128Mb entry-level unit from a manufacturer you’ve never heard of -or perhaps it was just me who missed Sumvision’s extensive advertising on TV and radio - should retail at less than £40. Peanuts really. Something sexier, like Creative’s MuVo2 offering retails around £150 and uses the same 4Gb MicroDrive found in JVCs camcorders referred to above to hold over 2,000 songs. At 4 minutes a song that’s over five and a half days of continuous (except to change/recharge the lithium-ion battery) music. Turn it off when you sleep and that stretches to over a weeks worth. Apple might have thought they had this market cornered with the iPod but that’s what Sony thought about the Walkman.
Just a quick comic aside, but I’ve seen a product called the LavNav featured online. It lights when approached, illuminates the target and avoids blinding the bleary-eyed visitor at 3am. Not one for every PC shop, but I’ve popped it on my xmas list. It’s not really the weather for USB-powered fans that clip to your laptop screen but I do like the look of ‘wireless’ networking. I don’t mean routers and access points; I mean a way of networking your home PCs through the 240v power circuit in your walls, at 14Mbps. Genius! Perhaps it’s old-hat to you but I’m impressed by Logic3’s £90 retail kit.
I did a piece on digital cameras the other month but I can’t resist quickly mentioning the replacement for my beloved (and recently dropped and broken) Fuji S5000 - the S5500. It has a 4Mp ‘traditional’ CCD rather than the 3ish mega pixel octagonal-element Super CCD of the older model. There’s a RAW uncompressed mode for the sharpest possible photos and a new 640x480 res. movie mode with sound. The 10x optical zoom is still there, along with the SLR styling and electronic viewfinder. Now, it’s unlikely I have a rich relative reading this, but maybe Santa will and I’m leaving room under my tree, just in case.
1165 words, as requested. Hope they’re good for you Ali, as I had a pig of a time with my PCs getting them too you!