Extract From Byte Magazine - Dec 18 - Pocket Media tools

[Steve Bildermann]

As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

A lot of multimedia capture devices, such as professional still and video cameras, are large and bulky, even in today's world of micro miniaturization. That's OK for studio work or productions with lots of support personnel to lug stuff around, but there's also a big need for ultraportable devices that you can slip in a pocket and always have with you (even if it's just to photograph your kids' birthday parties).

This week we'll take a look at three ultra portable media capture devices: Philips's 9350 voice recorder, Nikon's Coolpix SQ 3.1 megapixel camera, and RedHawk Vision's Paparazzi 2.0 Flash stick that creates hi res stills from digital video. <continued>

[Steve Bildermann]

Nikon's Coolpix SQ

Nearly every major camera manufacturer released at least one pocket sized camera this year. Canon's credit card sized Digital Elph and Casio's super slim Xlim are two I like a lot. Nikon's joined the fray with several models, but the one that got my attention is their sleek new Coolpix SQ.

The SQ is the only one of all these tiny cameras that features an innovative form factor. Instead of being a little box with a lens and an LCD, the SQ uses a swiveling handle and lens arrangement in which the lens rotates 120 degrees forward and 90 degrees back. I'm a big believer in this approach, which Nikon uses in their higher end Coolpix 4500. This swivel capability lets you you see exactly what you're doing while shooting from overhead or from very low angles. It's also far better for making eye contact with your subjects and shooting self portraits.

The silver SQ's square design looks great. I took it to Comdex, where everyone who saw it wanted to handle it. The body's all metal construction feels solid, and the sliding cover on the media/battery slot is much better than the rubberized covers on many competitive models. It weighs about half a pound with battery and media card installed.

The SQ has a 3X optical lens and uses Compact Flash (CF) cards for storage. Most small cameras are using SD and xD memory (or if it's a Sony, memory stick), but I'm a big believer in Compact Flash. All these cards use essentially the same technology, but because CF cards are a little larger, they'll always be ahead on the storage quantity curve because you can pack more in them. Plus, they're the card of choice for higher end cameras, so if you're at all serious about photography, you don't have to invest in multiple formats.

Startup is very fast on this camera, and there was little appreciable shutter lag. Image quality is good, but I found less information in the crucial midtones than a camera with a bigger lens would deliver. You can shoot up to three frames every two seconds, impressive in a camera of this class, and you can capture forty seconds of video and audio. There are fifteen scene modes (Sports, Landscape, Night time Party, etc.)

The SQ's 1.5 inch transflective LCD screen is outstanding. It's perfectly sharp and clear out of doors, and it gets better when the sun is brighter, rather than the other way around. In dark lighting situations, Nikon's Auto Focus Assist senses targets up to about fifteen to twenty feet.

The camera uses a proprietary Nikon Li ion battery that delivers over an hour of shooting. Figure on buying a second one to be on the safe side. The SQ comes with a well thought out charging station cradle that features one button image transfer to a PC or Mac via USB. The charger's also threaded on the bottom for connection to a tripod.

Nikon has vastly improved its menu options system, which used to be the most difficult one to navigate in the entire business. Some functions, such as deleting images from the media card, are still a little confusing, although not nearly as aggravating as they once were. If there's a way to turn off the image that briefly displays on the LCD after you take a shot, I never found it.

A significant design flaw on this camera is the lens cap, which attaches via a flimsy twisty strap that dangles and is destined to break. If you lose the cap, too bad for you, because a couple years from now it will be impossible to replace. A sliding door arrangement would have been a much cleaner and better solution.

I found the Coolpix SQ for sale on the Web for between $300 and $450, which is a great deal for a camera you can take with you anywhere you go, and never again have to agonize over the shot that got away.

Philips DPM 9350

The last pocket memo device I used was an analog microcassette recorder. I found it useful for conducting impromptu interviews or taking notes on the run, but I hated keeping track of the cassettes, and transcribing them was a pain. Philips has been a player in this market for a good while, and their new Digital Pocket Memo (DPM) 9350 shows how far along this technology has come since the dark old days of analog recording.

At 87 grams, the 9350 is a true featherweight, but thanks to its aluminum casing, it has structural integrity. Two AAA alkaline or NiMH batteries deliver ten hours of battery life. It uses Multimedia MMC/SD cards for data storage. A 16 MB card holds between 2 and four hours of recording, depending on quality setting, so a bigger card should get you through any conceivable situation.

The 9350 records to the DSS file format, which like MP3, is highly compressed. I was very impressed with the sound quality. You can set the sensitivity of the microphone through internal software or attach an external one, as well as a headset.

The 9350 is designed for one handed operation. A 4 position switch lets you move fluidly between Play, Stop, Record, Fast Forward, and Reverse. Or you can use voice activation to turn it on, and determine whether new audio inserts into an existing file, overwrites it, or deletes it entirely. A backlit LCD display updates you on the current track number, length, and other functions.

You can download your files from the unit to a Windows PC via USB (a slightly nonstandard cable is provided). Philips provides playback software as well as a program that lets you set up author IDs, file and job labels, and links to e mail addresses that audio files can be automatically sent to. For some reason this software requires a license key, which is kind of pointless since it's designed to work with a specific device, which is the ultimate hardware lock.

If you're into dictation and transcription software such as Dragon Systems Dragon Naturally Speaking, the 9350 would be a great companion product.

I found the DPM 9350 on the web for $265. You can port it out with an optional docking station, an earpiece, a lapel microphone, and a power supply. That adds up to a fair hunk of change, when you consider that the equivalent to those options come for free with the Nikon SQ camera disussed above, especially when you consider that camera technology is a good bit more complex than audio recording technology. Another nice option at this price might be MP3 capture, which Philips knows a thing or two about.

Nevertheless, if you're looking for a quality voice recorder, the Philips DPM 9350 is definitely worth your consideration.

RedHawk Vision's Paparazzi 2.0

RedHawk Visions's Paparazzi 2.0 creates high resolution stills from video sources. Even though Paparazzi is really a software application, it qualifies as a portable device because it's locked to a USB Flash drive, meaning you have to physically attach it to your computer before it'll run.

Paparazzi is more than a simple video to still image export utility. Rather than simply export a frame, it derives data from several sequential frames, essentially adding data from frames that are downstream from a frame you select. This really is great for extracting still images from video that would normally be too grungy to do anything with, including printing.

The difference between a regular frame exported from video and Paparazzi is remarkable. I exported a still from Adobe After Effects 6 and there was no comparison. Where the After Effects image was blocky and noisy, the Paparazzi picture was smooth and detailed. You can watch Paparazzi progressively render its images, which may lead you to selecting more optimization frames or, in the case of fast moving objects, less.

In addition to adding resolution to images, Paparazzi corrects video pixel aspect ratio so your pictures don't come out elongated, and converts color from NTSC video to the RGB color space. Obviously, the more resolution you start with, the better, so uncompressed video sources will yield superior results to MPEG files. The software is optimized to work with DV. You can also crop images before rendering them.

Paparazzi's interface couldn't be easier to operate, but it's a little primitive. For some reason, its window won't maximize to more than 1024 x 768 resolution. The program's capabilities are surprisingly limited in other ways as well. It only supports only three output sizes (1600 x 1280, 1120 x 800, and 960 x 640), and only writes to the JPEG format with no user definable compression settings that I could find. It opens AVI, QuickTime and MPEG files, but not Windows Media 9.

Paparazzi sells for $379 direct from RedHawk's site, which is about two thirds the cost of Adobe's Photoshop, and considerably more than Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, both of which offer hundreds upon hundreds of sophisticated image enhancement tools, not just one. For that price there should be user controls for saturation, hue, brightness, and other basic image processing stuff. Paparazzi does adjust the gamma of an image, but again there are no user controls for this function, so the correction may do things to your images you didn't intend.

I'm also not thrilled with the USB dongle setup. There are other programs such as Canopus ProCoder that use this protection scheme, so we now have to dedicate entire USB hubs to them. The Paparazzi dongle is a pretty thick one, and actually didn't fit on some of the portable computers we test with. In semi secure production environments, it also makes an attractive target for someone to walk off with.

I'm impressed with Paparazzi's results, but I'd like it better if it cost a third as much, supported more import and export formats (TIFFs in particular), enabled variable output resolutions, and doubled as a plugin to video editing programs like Adobe's Premiere Pro.