Widgx » Portable Video

Sony’s new Handycam DCR-SR80, DCR-SR60 and DCR-SR40 hard drive camcorders

T Evans — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:52:31 +0000

Sony’s all out assault on the marketplace didn’t stop with those wonderful new HD camcorders of theirs, they’ve also got three new standard definition Handycam units to show off. The DCR-SR80 leads the pack with a 1 megapixel CCD, 60GB drive, 2.7-inch widescreen viewfinder, 12x optical zoom, a hot shoe, and £400 price tag; the DCR-SR60 is essentially the same unit as the SR080, but with a 30GB drive and £350 price; the DCR-SR40 features a 40GB drive, 20x optical, 2.5-inch 4:3 aspect ratio touchscreen viewfinder, and £300 price point. All are due September, during which time we’d roughly estimate they’d vanish from store shelves in short order.

Sony unveils HD options with HDR-UX1 AVCHD cam alongside HDD unit

T Evans — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:48:25 +0000

AVCHD, the new recording format from Sony and Panasonic for saving HD video to 8-centimeter mini DVDs, is making its first appearance in Sony’s new HDR-UX1 upper-class consumer cam. For the most part the camera mirrors its SD siblings, with a side mounted disc drive, sizable 3.5-inch fold-out LCD, 4 megapixel stills and 2.3 megapixel shots while recording video. The snazz here is that the new AVCHD cam uses dual-layer mini DVD-R discs, making room for a full hour of 1080i video.

The HDR-SR1 mirrors the functions of its UX1 brother, but replaces the DVD drive for a 30GB HDD. Both cameras have a mic inputs and manual focus rings, making them more appealing to the discerning prosumer than most Sony cams of late. Of course, all this new format action and prosumer appeal comes at a price: the HDR-UX1 should drop in September for around £799, while the HDR-SR1 should appear in October for £850.

i-Station T43 PMP From Digital Cube

T Evans — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:28:33 +0000

Thank heavens, another portable media player for us to pick apart. The successor to last year’s V43, the T43 is a PMP that does what all good PMPs do: play your torrented videos and MP3s without making too much of a fuss. For the most part, it’s pretty similar to last year’s V43, but when was the last you expected consumer electronics companies to innovate?

The T43 has a few things going for it that make it something more than just a hard drive with a headphone jack. It can tune into DMB broadcasts, all but useless in the US, but given Digital Cube’s location (South Korea), it makes sense. It even uses GPS in some capacity, by the looks of it, navigation. The 4.3″ 480 x 272 pixel resolution screen will show off all the MPEGs and Xvids (among other formats) you feed its 20 or 30GB hard drive. It runs on Linux, no doubt winning it brownie points in the OSS community. If and when it makes its way out of Korea is unknown just yet, as well as for how much. But that information’s boring anyway.

Meizu Mini Player – is the ipod finally beaten?

T Evans — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:42:40 +0000

Available in either 1GB ($139), 2GB ($159), or 4GB ($220) versions – the Meizu Mini Player is capable of all the usual assortment of MP3, WMA, WAV, and OGG audio file playback. However it also plays AVI movies on its 2.4-inch QVGA screen as well. Also included are an FM tuner, voice recorder, calendar, stopwatch, USB On The Go support, and a couple of games, which is a lot more features than the nano offers and for less wonga, so it looks like Apple has reason to be mighty worried come July or early August when the first shipments of these arrive. The first few reviews of these things are starting to appear and so far they have all been possitive and of the general conclusion that it is indeed better than an ipod. The only downside found to date has been that the video playback is only 16 fps – but it’s good enough for movies on the go.

Rover TV Portable Media Player

T Evans — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:45:52 +0000

Not only is this little beauty small and perfectly formed it packs some nifty features in to. It can record live TV without the need for a computer. Leading to the claim from it’s manufactures that the device promises to “change the way we watch tv forever”. Well we are not toatly convinced by that – I for one still plan to use my eyes. But it’s a pretty impressive feature nontheless. It also uses the efficient MPEG4 codec – which is a good thing as the only memory available comes in the form of SD cards.
The RoverTV is available in two configurations, a $300 “Big Screen” model and a $350 “Wide Screen” model. Both are identical save for the screen size, with the “Big Screen” featuring a 3.5″ (320 x 240 pixel resolution) screen and the “Wide Screen” featuring a 4″ (480 x 272 pixel resolution) screen. The battery life is generous, offering 12 hours of playback when listening to audio and six hours when viewing video. It is available now from online retailers, so what are you waiting for.

odd-i’s P11N Win CE 5.0 PMP with GPS

K Saleh — Sat, 20 May 2006 17:42:16 +0000

The P10 carriers over so it still sports that same 4-inch, (480 x 272) 16:9 TFT LCD, unspecified dual core CPU, 2 megapixel cam, the ability to record direct from TV, up to 30GB of storage, USB 2.0 hosting, eBook reader, and support for a wide range of media formats including MPEG-1/4, Xvid, DiVx, WMV, MP3, WMA, OGG and AC3. What a great device to be keeping in your pocket. Now all you need to do is get a matching Ferrari.

DualCor cPC – specs, launch date & disappointment

T Evans — Thu, 11 May 2006 23:43:58 +0000

So how does the “ultimate convergence device” sound? PC features in your pocket so you can truly work & play on the move. Sounded like an excellent idea to us – especially the convergence part. Well that was until they decided to remove the cellphone capabilities it was reportedly going to have. Oh and then some clever dick decided ‘why not remove all radio support all together?’ great idea conferred the other monkeys sat around the table, ‘anyone for PG Tips?’ Yes that’s right in all their monkey wisdom DualCor Technologies have decided against any form or inbuilt Bluetooth, WiFi or 3G. Now exactly what the point of this device now is or more importantly who is going to buy it eludes us quite frankly. So purely for entertainment value here are the specs: the XP side of the device powered by a 1.5GHz Via processor that’s backed by a full gig of DDR2 RAM. Both OSes can store data on the 30GB hard drive (and not 40GB as we previously reported) or the 1GB of NAND flash memory, with the Windows Mobile 5.0 side is supported by a 400MHz Intel PXA263 chip and 128MB of DRAM. Shipping will start in the next 90 days.

Next-gen Ipod chips to be supplied by Samsung

T Evans — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:40:20 +0000

Apple today announced that it has chosen Samsung to provide the chips for their next-gen ipods. Samsung where chosen over PortalPlayer – apple’s current supplier. A Samsung exec, Jon Kang, commented “I knew PortalPlayer would take a dive, adding, “I knew that we would win this design.” So a nice non-modest response from Samsung then! Meanwhile PortalPlayer are left to lick their wounds after loosing – the Apple contract was 90% of their revenue and their stock fell 40% in ten minutes today – Ouch!

Sony MemoryStick Recorder

Admin — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:19:04 +0000

Sony has announced a new direct to MS video recorder and is only for the (MemoryStick).The MSVR-A10 is a MS reader/recorder that supports the MPEG-4 AVC(H.264) format and encodes the video straight onto the Memorysticks.Quite usefull to be able to easily record movies for your PSP and Sony Ericsson Mobiles.

Tiny Arcade Cabinet for iPod Nano

Admin — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 23:44:06 +0000

Having got Pac Man to run on a Linux enabled iPod,this clever gamer built a tiny replica arcade cabinet to hold his iPod Nano while he played on it,then posted photos showing how he did it.