Recently in Equipment->Reviews Category

It's official, hell has frozen over and I've bought a Windows XP legtop. I've been wanting an ultra-mobile PC for a while, Apple was dragging its feet on the rumored iTablet (I don't like tablet computing anyway), and it didn't look like the iPhone or other smartphone was going to cut it for Real Work™. Meanwhile there's been a lot of activity on the Windows/Linux side with the OLPC initative, the Intel Classmate, and now the Asus Eee PC.

Back in the US this week for the AAAs, I decided to pick up an Eee PC 701 for $399 and loaded it up with 1 gigabyte of DDR2 ram and a 16 gigabyte SDHC card for storage. Yale has a site-license for XP so I installed that instead of the default Xandros Linux. Why? Because there is some Japanese software/hardware (namely the new portable ScanSnap 300 that I want to run that only works with Windows (not Wine, I tried).

The Eee is quite a marvel, tiny compared to my PowerBook G4 15" above (click on the photo to enlarge it) -- but still usable. I bought a Zaurus two years ago as my UMPC and its keyboard killed me. I'm hoping that the Eee PC will be the ideal field machine. You can touch type on it, it is extremely lightweight and small, it has no moving parts (solid state memory disks only), is totally silent, and reasonably fast.

Skype works great, especially video skype with the built-in webcam. Thunderbird and Firefox are snappy. I installed StarOffice which seems to work fine -- I'll try Office 2007 next week and let you know how it goes.

I travel quite a bit with my laptop and am always on the lookout for open access points to check my mail. It's a bit of a pain to dig out my PowerBook only to find out there's nothing in range.

I've been interested in the Planex GW-US54GD WiFi Dongle / Detector / Access Point for a while, but it used to cost around ¥8000 or around USD$75 which was a bit rich for such a gadget. I found it recently on sale for ¥2980 ($25) at a store in Kyoto, so I picked one up. The Japanese name of the product is 電波男 (Dempa Otoko or Wave Man -- a pun on the otaku film/novel 電車男 (Densha Otoko or Train Man).

I've been recording some Ainu music and dance performances on the side. I needed a second mic unit, so I bought the Samson Zoom H4 to complement my current Edirol R-09. I was waiting for the H2, but its ship date seems to have been pushed back to late August. The H4 was ¥27620 or approximately $230 by mail order.

Here are my preliminary thoughts on the Zoom H4:

Size: The unit is much bigger than I thought, the H4 seems almost twice the size of the R-09. It seems needlessly large, as though they could have reduced it to half the length if they wanted to.

External Mics: The H4 seems to have excellent sound recording when using an external XLR mic such as my Sennheiser ME64. The preamps are very quiet. The H4 supplies true +48V phantom power (+24V selectable) to the mic. One thing that seems odd is that I haven't found how to make the unit record in mono if there is only one mic attached.

Internal mics: Preliminary tests suggest that the internal X-Y configuration condensers are quite sensitive and separation is quite good. However, the internal pre-amps have a considerably higher noise floor compared to my Sennheiser ME64 condenser mic when plugged into the external XLR jack of the H4. Also, I'm very surprised that the internal mics on the H4 don't have any type of shock mounting. This means that any button press or even the faint sound of your hand sliding on the unit body gets transmitted to the mics. I would have liked to have seen the internal mics at least a little more isolated from the case.

Recording Mode Selection: I like the easy one-button selection and display of the current recording type (MP3 / WAV), bitrate, and bit depth. I switch between using MP3 compressed formats and uncompressed WAV files depending on what I'm recording. This requires going through a menu structure on the R-09 but only one-click on the H4.

Levels / Attenuation: You can't change the sound levels / attenuation without going first to the input menu, selecting levels, and then clicking through a couple more items. All of these button clicks are transmitted to the internal mics and to your recording. I would've preferred a simple one-button level control as on the R-09.

Lack of peak meter: The R-09 has a separate peak LED that lights when the recording levels are too high and are clipping. While the H4 has level meters, they aren't always visible and it's not easy to tell when it is clipping.

Batteries: Battery life is about 4 hours with two alkaline AAs. The H4 does not officially support NiCad/NiMH rechargeable batteries. Exacerbating the lack of support for rechargeables, it does not have a battery level meter, so you can't tell if your batteries are good or half-finished. Also, the H4 can't turn itself off if you leave it on by mistake. The R-09 supports NiMH and alkalin, has a battery meter, and can turn itself off when unusued.

Accessories: The Zoom comes with a tripod adapter, wind shield, and thin case. The Edirol doesn't come with any of these. Unfortunately, the Zoom's tripod adapter has no shock mounting and since the internal mics are also not shock mounted, any vibration coming through the tripod mount will show up in the recording.

One of the doctoral students asked me in May which digital camera he should get for his summer predissertation fieldwork. He was leaning towards getting a digital SLR but I suggested he instead look at high-end compact digital point-and-shoots -- specifically the ones in the 8-10 megapixel and $400-600 range. He ended up getting the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2.

Just as I believe that film rangefinders are superior to film SLRs for ethnographic work because of their portability and inconspiciousness, I think the high-end compact digital camera has now come of age. They now have just as many megapixels as their dSLR brethren and if the engineers can work on the noise reduction of high-ISO images just a little bit more (and put back in optical viewfinders), they'll be perfect.

Fast forward a month later and I'm in Japan looking at the various options for my own fieldwork this summer and fall. After a couple of hours playing with the various cameras at Yodobashi Camera in Umeda (Osaka Station), I ended up choosing the same camera -- the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2. Here are the things that I particularly like about it:

• 16:9 frame format (4:3 and 3:2 selectable)
• 24mm equivalent on the widest angle, about 100 mm on the tele
• 10 megapixels
• SDHC compatible -- I bought an 8 gigabyte SDHC card for it
• Movie format (MJPEG)

There's some shutter lag, but if you prefocus you can take sports photographs with a little practice (see photograph of one of my informants playing ball). I'm also playing with the movie mode and finding it isn't nearly as unusable as I thought it'd be.

Now the big news is that the new Mac OS 10.4.10 update now supports the Lumix RAW format of the LX2. I'm storing all my fieldwork photographs in Apple Aperture and using its powerful organizing indexing functions.

I bought the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 the other day. I'm quite fond of Microsoft input devices, I have their USB keyboard / mouse combination at work and at home. I bought the Presenter 8000 because I'm giving a lot of talks and I thought a little presenter mouse would be good. The 8000 operates normally as a 4 button scroll-tilt mouse, but then it also has presenter buttons on the underside.

It's a bluetooth mouse so I thought I would be able to just use my internal bluetooth drivers on my Mac PowerBook G4. Unfortunately while most of Microsoft's mice are totally Mac-compliant, the 8000 doesn't properly register itself as a Bluetooth mouse and you need to hack it somewhat to get the Mac to recognize it. I found the solution on Mac Rumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=249841&page=2 in a posting by viper0440 (scroll midway down).

There's a very nice review of the new Arca-Swiss Monoball Z1 ballhead on the-digital-picture.com:

For many years, the Arca-Swiss B1 Ballhead was the standard by which all other ballheads were judged. The Arca-Swiss Monoball Z1 Ballhead replaces this model and delivers the same performance in a smaller size and at a significantly lower price. There is not much to dislike about this change.

The reviewer compares it against the old standard, the Arca-Swiss B1 (which I have and love and review here on my website) as well as the Really Right Stuff BH-55.

Read more....

Jason Romero sent me a link to the BoingBoing blog entry about a review of the SpiderBrace on CoolTools. This is not a bad looking brace and the price is right ($70), but I'd have some concerns using it with my Canon XL-H1:

• Both forearms getting tired since it doesn't look like it redistributes any more weight to your back rather than to your arms
• Lack of camcorder controls at your fingertips

From the picture, the Spiderbrace really seems designed for the new HDV mid-size camcorders that are coming out rather than full-size HDV camcorders like the XL-H1.

Gizmodo blogs about the new Samson Zoom H-4 field recorder, which seems extremely promising. At only $300, it is about $100 less expensive than either the Edirol R-09 (which is what I have) or the Microtrack 24/96 (which is very popular). The interface for the Samson looks absolutely fantastic and it has two XLR balanced inputs, which none of its competitors have.

The mike placement of the Samson is a spitting image of the Sony PCM-D1, which costs about $2000. The X-Y configuration is designed to give you a better sound field by reducing the possibility of the stereo mics being out of phase with each other.

Samson's product home page is here and they also have a copy of the manual online, which gives some of its specs. After the jump is a comparison of the Samson H4 against the Edirol R-09. The main defect that I can see is the lack of a time/date stamp on the files. This makes it much harder to use as a field recorder -- or as the audio component of a dual-system video recorder.

I'm thinking of picking one up as it seems very promising. No one has it in stock yet though. There are also only a few reviews online, but check the video review on Neo-Fight.tv.

After much vacillating, I decided to get the Edirol R-09 digital recorder to record audio in the field. The other choice was the MicroTrack 24/96. The R-09 and the MicroTrack are almost identical in size, weight, and price. See my previous blog entries on this topic (here or here or here). The main factors were:

• Replaceable AA batteries rather than proprietary
  
• Built-in mic (one less thing to lose)
  
• Time/date stamping
  

There are some notes and a more extensive chart comparing the two after the jump.

Core-Sound.com has a comprehensive review of various flash-memory based field recorders. They cover the: CoreSound PDAudio, Marantz PMD670, Marantz PMD671, Sound Devices 722, Fostex FR-2, M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96, Edirol R-1.

Now, CoreSound makes the PDAudio, so take some of their qualitative comments with a grain of salt. It's also considerably more expensive than the other solutions at around $1500. Check my older blog articles on field recorders.

StudioDaily.com has a review by Bruce Johnson of the Canon XL-H1 camera:

While Canon has turned out dozens of great still cameras and lenses over the years, when the DV revolution came about the company was relatively unknown in the video world. Canon’s consumer cameras were a mixed lot — anyone remember the original ZR? Now that was weird. And even when the XL1 came out, it certainly wasn’t perfect. I ought to know, I bought one and own it to this day. But give Canon credit, it was committed to fixing its problems and improving the camera. Learning from its fixes on the XL1, many additions and modifications on the XL1s, and many more on the XL2, which I also own, here comes Canon again with the XL H1. It’s no exaggeration to declare it a worthy successor to its older siblings.

I've reviewed the XL-H1 here too. And in other news, the new version of Apple Final Cut Studio 5.1 is supposed to support 24P/30P on the XL-H1, although I don't see it on their Qualified Devices list.

As usual, DPReview.com is the first to break the story on the new Canon EOS 30D being released at PMA. It's basically an updated 20D with the exact same CMOS sensor -- the only changes are a slightly larger LCD, slight modification of the body (to make it feel closer to the 5D), and ... (drum roll please) .... spot metering.

Price looks like it'll be around $1300. I'm only slightly excited about this -- the mods are so small that they should have just called it the 20D Mark II and not get us all confused with the much older EOS D30.

David Pogue reviews the Sanyo Xacti HD1 for the NYTimes. Registration required and it will not stay up for very long, so read it quickly!

The HD1 is a solid-state (flash memory card) 720p camcorder that will retail around $800. Battery life is only an hour, a 2-giga SD card only holds 28 minutes at max quality, and Pogue makes it seem that there are considerable tradeoffs in terms of image quality as well. Well, it's a version 1.0. We can all hope that the Xacti HD2 will fix all the bugs of its predecessor.

VideoSystems.com has a review of the newly announced Panasonic HVX-200 high-definition camcorder. It uses the P2 solid-state memory cards in lieu of HDV tapes. The specs: 1080p @ 60p with RGB4:4:4... All for only $6000 (albeit the P2 cards are going to bankrupt you).

Information and specs on the newest Sony HDV camcorder - the HDR-HC3 - have been leaked on CamcorderInfo.com. The new HC-3 appears to be a new lower-end consumer version of the wildly popular HC-1 model. The HC-3 looks like it will have less pixels, is smaller, and won't have as many manual controls. The killer for independent filmmakers is the lack of external microphone and headphones jacks, as well as no way to adjust the shutter speed.