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› archive for January 7th, 2010

CES Update: Sony Announces new Cybershots, DSC-TX7 on top

The DSC-TX7 lacks a snappy nick-name like the bloggie, any suggestions?

Sony trots out the 3.5″ (diagonal) touch-screen driven DSC-TX7, arrival on shelves TBA. It sports the backlit Exmor R sensor, which should allow for better low-light imaging than competitors’ sensors. They’re hi-lighting the new hardened glass cover over the touch-screen, purportedly twice as strong as the T90′s screen, the 10 frames in one second function, an HDR solution to back lit subjects, and a 243 degree panoramic function. All of it sounds pretty classy to me.



CES Update: Sony announces bloggie ™, Derek rejoices

Just call it the bloggie (TM) -it's a lot friendlier to your mouth than "MHS-PM5"

Just call it the bloggie (TM) -it’s a lot friendlier to your mouth than “MHS-PM5,” which sounds a little like something just waiting to close down schools and introduce an aporkalyptic prophecy logo on national news networks. Derek, by the way, was near trilling with excitement over a product called “bloggie” from a big-name manufacturer.

The bloggie (TM) records 1920×1080 HD video to a 1/2.5″ CMOS sensor -it’s small being 3/4 inch thick, 4 3/8 long, and 2 1/4 wide, and yet they’ve crammed Face Detection, SteadyShot optical image stabilization, a fold out USB 2.0 adapter, and a 2.4″ LCD monitor which slips between portrait and landscape playback with the angle of the device.

I hear a number of people deride the tiny-cam market, but I love ‘em. Sure hours of vacuous inanity gets recorded, uploaded, and repeated in the vast, practically infinite space of the internet but hey, that seems to describe most television programming too.

The bloggie (TM) has only 26MB onboard memory, but takes Sony’s proprietary MemoryStick technology and the 8GB size should render about 80 minutes of full HD recording. It appears in teal, eggplant, and white.



Panasonic Finally Decides To Bless Us With SDXC, All The Way Up to 64GB

SDXC, which was announced at last year’s CES and has theoretical maximums of 2 TB capacity and 300mb/s speed (currently limited to 104mb/s, but the engineers remain confident they can break the barrier), is finally seeing some real-world love as Panasonic announces at this year’s CES that it’ll be dropping this on the market next month. The prices being batted around right now are jaw-dropping but not unexpected, at $499.95 for 48GB or $599.95 for 64GB. But, it’s good to see it cross the line to reality at all.



Olympus Trots Out New Cameras, Oohs and Aahs Presumably Follow

Olympus took some time out at CES to announce several new models of point-and-shoots, in the forms of the new Stylus Tough 3000, the Stylus-5010, Stylus-7030, Stylus-7040, FE-47, and FE-4020. Presumably they also have specifications, which so far I haven’t yet had time to parse. They all appear to have 14 megapixel sensors, which is unexpected since they cover three product ranges (entry-level, stylish, and all-weather), but hey, go consistency.

Oh, and did I mention they take SD/SDHC? For those of you who own Canon’s or Nikon’s, you may wonder what the deal is, but for anyone who’s had to suffer through the amazingly slow write times of Olympus’ legacy xD cards, this’ll be the biggest thing Olympus has done for you in years. We mean it.

Oh, and they are all very pretty, as always. Imaging-Resource has some early hands-ons for them all, so hit the link to go there.



Polaroid Decides CES Is Too Boring, Declares Lady Gaga Creative Director

Insert Whatever Jokes You Want HereSo, we’re creating a “WTF” category just for this because I cannot file this anywhere else. Polaroid yesterday announced they were name Lady Gaga creative director of a new line of fashion-based products. Now, I actually rather like Lady Gaga, she’s delightfully fun, and equally insane, but even I saw this press release and went ‘bwuuuuh? srsly?’

Which is better than my editor’s reaction, which was so spectacularly incredulous I wish I had a picture of it.

Anyway, this is apparently in all seriousness, hit the external link below to read the original press release.




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