Posted on by lhl

La la la, ultracompact cameras… A lot of stuff at dpr’s Photokina 2002 show report. It’s a shame that a lot of the camera’s I’m comparing don’t have start-up and shot-to-shot times.

  Minolta Dimage Xi Casio EX-M1 Fujifilm F402 Sony DSC-FX77
Lens 37-111mm eq 37mm eq 39mm eq 37mm eq
Aperture f2.8-3.6 f2.5 f3.2 f2.8
Shutter 2 – 1/1000 sec 1/4 – 1/6400 sec 1/4 – 1/2000s 1/30 – 1/1000s
Sensitivity ISO 50-400 ? ISO 200-400 (800-1600 @ 1MP) ISO 100-400
Res 3.2MP 1.3MP 2.1MP (sCCD 4MP) 4.0MP
Size 85 x 72 x 20mm 88 x 55 x 11.3mm 77 x 69 x 22mm 98.1 x 71.0 x 27.0mm
Weight 130g 87g 125g 185g
Startup 1.2s 1-2s ? <1s
S2S ? 0.6s ? ?
Extra   MP3 macro Bluetooth, Zeiss Lens, swivel
Price $350? $300? $350 Unavailable in US

Right now I’m tending toward the F402… f3.2 (slightly disappointing), but being able to shoot decent ISO 1600 (check out these sample pictures from a similar class imager? Tempting… The Sony probably has the best image quality (nice Carl Zeiss lens), and the Bluetooth/BIP support and swivel are very tempting, but it looks like it’s not available in the US right now (Japan and Europe only currently). Canon has a new IXUS coming out soon, I believe, but we’ll have to see. It’s unfortunate that none of these cameras use CF (the Canon does).

Posted on by lhl

Hmm, I’m #1 on hiptop on daypop, which sorta makes sense I guess, seeing as until recently this blog has been a fairly well respected, mediumly trafficked tech/web blog that has, over the past week turned into the Hiptop Junkie Blog. Which is not too bad, as a few weeks before it was the ‘tired of doing this, taking way too much time, time to go into reruns blog’ (still in the plans, sorta).

Posted on by lhl

Too bad the guest blog on boingboing doesn’t have permalinks. Xeni has some super interesting stuff on those ER1 robots up right now. Saw those at E3 this year. Fun stuff.

Speaking of boingboing, saw a post entitled Sidekick’s browser blows that was slightly misattributed/misconstrued. I saw this post (while I was showing my friend about Blöödhag) and posted a reply in the discussions on my hiptop so the browser can’t be that bad.

All Hiptop, All the Time

Posted on by lhl

Some people have questioned the usefulness of the hiptop, but if you’re ever out and about, trust me, it’s indispensible. Remember the last time you had to meet up with someone and they didn’t have a cell phone on them and you didn’t know if you had missed them, or they had missed you? Yeah, having the hiptop around is as big of a leap as when cell phones became consumer devices. It’s the first (acceptably usable) generation of the communications devices that will truly change how we interact. Here’s a real listing of how it came in handy the other night night:

  • I was sitting in the theater and realized I didn’t remember where the afterparty was. Checked my mail (the find feature is sorely missing, although the sorting worked OK) only to find the message wasn’t POPed, so I used mail2web (hmm, mail2pda is slightly more optimized, but POP only)
  • After finding the name of the place, I went to Citysearch, found the location, and got walking directions
  • In the morning, while we were discussing the movie, I did an IMDB search and got the cast info. Also in discussion, I looked up how many IP addresses are available under IPv6 (340 trillion trillion trillion addresses)

Now, while that last thing (and all the aiming, emailing, and boingboing surfing in between) was mostly for entertainment, those first two things were pretty majorly useful, and saved a lot of headache. With a hiptop, you can check traffic reports online (color really would be useful in this case, though), if you’re in a club or other noisy environment (or a quiet environment where talking is a no-no, or where synchronous communication is otherwise impossible), you can still exchange time-dependent messages either via IM or email. Plus, just think about all the useful information online, and all those times where “if you only had access to a web you could.”

So finally, here it is, easy to use and unmetered (no worries of counting cents/kb). Now, if this thing had ssh…