I’m extremely happy with my Panasonic FZ150 – a 12MP bridge camera with 24x optical zoom and a compact sensor. Yes, a compact sensor. Although I get the advantage of a lightweight cam with up to 50X of non-degraded zoom (at 5mp) I don’t have the advantage of tiny F-Stops or sensors that are able to receive 10 times the light that a DSLR would. It would be a major issue if the FZ150 didn’t have such an amazing stabilization system…
The two pictures above were taken at full zoom….handheld. That’s 50x non-degrading zoom at 5MP on a 12MP sensor. That moon is obviously a long way away. I’ve cropped the image but it still looks impressive. The helicopter was a long way away too. Here’s the 1:1 version….
Here’s the unboxing and walk-round of the Panasonic Lumix FZ150 that I’m starting to test for my online photo and video work. The unboxing was done a few days ago so I’m already well into testing. In terms of sensor performance it’s doing what I expected. It’s completely trashing my 5-yr old Canon S2IS bridge camera. Interestingly though, it’s getting better results than the Nokia N8 in a handheld low-low-light test. It’s an important test for me and an important result because the Nokia N8 is a quality camera and has a larger sensor. On top of that the FZ150 has an amazing image stabilization system. The N8 is still a camera I will use because it’s tiny and internet-connected but the FZ150 is opening up new photography possibilities. Once again, I haven’t bought a DSLR because I don’t believe I need that much focus on quality photography. What I do is not photography! I don’t really fancy the weight and cost of a DSLR either. Maybe the FZ150 is something for you too? Stay tuned for more posts.
At IFA last week I took the brave step of leaving my PC at home. For someone whos job it is to create content for websites and YouTube it wasn’t something that was easy to achieve but over the last year I’ve been getting more and more comfortable with my Galaxy Tab and Nokia N8 as an unbeatable combination for when I’m mobile.
I sacrifice a bit of quality to improved battery life, speed and sharing. It worked out well and I’m doing it again next we at the Intel Developers Forum where Ben and I will be from Monday to Thursday.
The quality of media created when mobile has improved a lot over the years and I’m sure that I’ll have to take steps to keep up but what I find interesting is that tablets and smartphones are leading in terms of quality. PCs just aren’t keeping up. Apps, location, sharing, always-on, cameras and mobile connectivity are often better on these mobile devices. There will always be times when I want to put my bum on a seat and work with multiple windows and multiple media sources to create higher quality content, but not when I’m on the road.
Here’s a post about mobile blogging with the Kohjinsha SA1 Ultra Mobile PC, in 2007
There’s four three things that I want to show in this blog.
How to do a high quality photo post to Flickr in 60 seconds.
How to do a mobile photo blog using LiveWriter
The typing experience on the SA1
In the videos below you will see me write the live section of this post (I will have posted this blog entry live during my video recording.)
———-LIVE SECTION STARTS HERE—————-
This is the Kohji SA1. I’m using it to demo near-live photo bloging. The keyboard is very small but i’ve got used to it now and can type with a fair rate of accuracy and a good speed. I also ike this you can thumb the keyboad.
————END of live blog ———————————-
Here’s the Flickr image
The quality of the video (below) is not great because I had to use a web cam to record the video but in it you can see the very quick post to flikr and, what I think is more interesting, the use of the Kohjinsha, the Canon, 3G connection and LiveWriter to edit and post a blog. The technology is nothing new but it demonstrates how low-power mobile computing ties it all together. The total weight of the hardware is about 2Kilos and the power drain is about 8w. The whole thing could be run from lightweight solar panels.
We’re forecast some cold weather here in the next week. If it starts snowing in the hills near me I’ll try and get out with the Kohji and a hip-flask to do some live work from the hills.
I’m also looking into getting one of these solar kits. Anyone had any experience with them? I’m guessing the 12W one would be good enough. I need it to be able to directly power the Kohji via some sot of regulator. Or is there a regulator built into all notebook charging circuits? More research needed here methinks!
