The first album I ever fell in love with was the Eagle’s 1977 Hotel California. I must have spun that old vinyl 33 a thousand times on my brand new Ward’s Airline Stereo. Pretty cool stuff for a kid. New stereo, new music. new ideas. I just found out last night, that I’ve never actually heard the song.

I’ve never been a hardcore music fan. My college roommate, ran UCLA’s radio station in the mid 80s, and probably owned a bazillion albums. I had maybe 20. So I’m not really the ultimate customer for an IPOD. I like music, but couldn’t see my way to spending 300 bucks on an MP3 player, or a thousand dollars to fill it up. I’m fine with my car stereo and an occasional tune on the stereo system in my office. So I got picked, as the closest thing to a civilian here in our studios, to evaluate and test what’s new in MP3 players and portable music devices.

So let me tell you right off the bat, bang for the buck, the New SANSA Shaker will rock your world. This 30 dollar MP3 player has a purity and clarity of sound that is just amazing. I loaded up a digitally mastered recording of Hotel California, put in the earbuds, gave it a shake and heard the opening 12 string guitar like i’ve never heard it before. The stereo separation is so perfect, you can feel the marracas shaking on your left, the guitar in the center of your soul, the drummer in front and the audience to your right. Stellar, beautiful, clear, rich, rounded sound. Its almost enough to make you understand why people get addicted to their IPOD. I always wondered what stereo was good for. With the Shaker I understand. The first question I had was: Do all little earbud MP3 players sound this good? I loaded up the song on a $90 dollar VIBE from PNY, popped in my earbuds and heard plain old transister radio quality sound. So, no. Great sound is not a done deal, but the Sansa guys got it right. And this is their bottom of the line unit.

Nevertheless, even though I’m inclined to keep the Shaker myself, I’m not the real target demographic. It says right on the packaging: Ages 8 and UP. Thus, before I had a chance to discover great new sound, my two preteen sons have been marching around for the last week constantly rocking to the beat of their own shakers. My 12 year old has been asking for an IPOD for months, and was thrilled when I tossed him the Shaker. Ergonomically, its no IPOD look alike, so its cool to be the only kid in class carrying one. The Shaker is shaped like a little salt shaker, with a twist band top and bottom to control sound and navigation. Just give it a little wrist flick shake and it’ll randomly pick a new song to play.

He tells me its simple to load songs. (even his mom could do it). Plug in the scsi cable to the bottom of the shaker. Then open an explorer window to the list of songs on his PC, open another to the SANSA (because its built around a removable SD card - just like your digital camera- it shows up as just another removable harddrive on your PC) and drag the files you want from one to the other.

The Shaker is a really well designed little package with intuitive controls and nice extra features. Since the music is stored on a removable SD card (Sandisk’s core product) you can easily expand capacity, and in theory have an unlimited supply of songs available to your shaker.
Even better, you can grab a few low capacity SD cards for 10 bucks a piece and use one for each kid, or even one for you to store that new audio book you just downloaded. Best of all for a rugged little player aimed at kids, the Shaker is easy to share. It comes with an external speaker - so everyone can hear it, has enough power to drive a bigger pair of speakers or feed a stereo system, and even comes with Two headset jacks so the kids can listen together and Mom and Dad can still have some peace and quiet.

All in all, at the price, i would call it a sure fire gift for all of family holiday gift exchanges. The only guys who won’t love the shaker are the Zune product managers over at Microsoft. I don’t see how they are ever gonna be number two with Sansa in their way.

Check out SanDisk’s Product page here to learn more.

No more “digital Visine”, software to eliminate red eyes from photos!

Kodak camera sensor may eliminate flash

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Eastman Kodak said Thursday it has developed digital camera technology that nearly eliminates the need for flash photography, part of the company’s effort to make money from its deep patent portfolio.

The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light. Image sensors act as a digital camera’s eyes by converting light into an electric charge to begin the capture process.

Kodak, which is in the last year of a lengthy and expensive transformation into a digital photography company as its film business shrinks, intends to lean on its wealth of intellectual property to boost its bottom line, expecting up to $250 million this year alone in royalties and related revenues.
…
Kodak said the new technology advances an existing Kodak standard in digital imaging. Today, the design of almost all color image sensors is based on the “Bayer Pattern,” an arrangement of red, green and blue pixels first developed by Kodak scientist Bryce Bayer in 1976.

In this design, half of the pixels on the sensor are used to collect green light, with the remaining pixels split evenly between sensitivity to red and blue light.

After exposure, software reconstructs a full-color signal for each pixel in the final image. Kodak’s new proprietary technology adds “clear” pixels to the red, green and blue elements that form the image sensor array, collecting a higher proportion of the light striking the sensor.

Manufacturing customers interested in the design will likely get a chance to sample it in early 2008, but Kodak’s McNiffe was unsure when devices using the technology would be in stores. The technology could be used at first in consumer gadgets such as cell phones and eventually in products made for industrial and scientific imaging.

We are working on a review of Digital SLR cameras. I just got a new Pentax k100D camera. We will also be reviewing the Canon Rebel XTi, Nikon D80 and the Sony A100k Alpha.

Thoughts about the Pentax k100d:

It comes well packaged, pieces nicely protected. I got it with the 18- 55mm lens kit standard.

I popped in new ultra II sdhc 4.0 GB card from SanDisk, got a memory card error right away. Oh well, nothing technical is supposed to be too easy..

So I registered on line, did a quick google search and found i needed a firmware upgrade. The sdhc is so new, so big, goes beyond the the sd parameters, so the camera needs new firmware to use the high capacity card. I just love a camera that can be altered just by loading new firmware. kudos to pentax.

The process of upgrading the firmware in a Pentax k100D is pretty simple, if you have another old sd card around. You need at least 8mb. SO borrow a friend’s for an hour, or pick one up on ebay for 10 bucks. I borrowed one out of my Minolta Dimage z1.

All you need to do is copy the firmware upate onto the smaller capacity SD card and start the camera while holding down the menu key. It will walk installthe upgrade for you.

To find the upgrade go here:

This Pentax page has the download.
Save the exe file to your computer and run it. Its a self extracting EXE file , it will extract a bin file.

copy the bin file (a binary file with new firmware) onto an sd card. put the sd card in the camera with the power off.

then hold down the menu button on the left back of the camera and hold it while you turn on the camera. it should show you the old firmware version and then show that it is updating.

the camera’s screen has a litle image that says program update yes/ no use the up down arrows near the ok button to choose yes and just wait.
takes a few minutes to load goes through two phases, but has a fine little progress indicator so that you know what is happening. When you are done, take out the old sd card, pop in the new ultra high capacity card and you are off to the races.

Five minutes later i was ready to start learning and testing the camera.

Up and Running with the Pentax K100D

The Pentax k100d Digital SLR (DSLR) camera feels great in your hand. Definitely designed for a righty, with the the built in hand hold on the right side that has become a pretty standard design feature in all but the slimmest of digital cameras. The camera is definitely heavier than a little fixed lens zoom digital like the Minolta Dimage Z series. I’ll weigh them both and post it in another entry later. The balance is fine, no wobble to the camera. You can use it with one hand but definitely more stable with that left hand adding some balance.

I’ve been shooting with a Minolta Dimage Z1 with a 10 times optical zoom, and have mostly been happy with it. But its been just powerful enough to make me want a more substantial, versatile camera. My number one complaint with the simpler camera is stability and vibration. When you try to get an indoor shot, you often get blur or trailing motion. The Pentax is a Rock. Totally stable. No shake, no jitter. It has an anti shake setting. I was able to get ambient light, night time indoor lighting only shots of my daughters sleeping and playing with crisp edges.

Tonite I’m going to try to test another of its stability features: A 2 second delay on the shutter. Why does that matter? I’ve tried a number of times to get a decent nighttime shot of the Downtown Los Angeles Skyline from my deck. But even with a tripod I always get light trails. The Pentax manual suggests the problem might be the subtle rocking of the camera when i push the shutter release button and the internal mirror moves.

The manual suggests that if I use my tripod and the 2 second delay, the camera will have a couple moments to stabilize after i push the button before the image is snapped. I’ll let you know in my next post.

The camera has a batch of preprogrammed scene types where it will optimize its performance. Nighttime scenes, bright snow scenes, text on a page, sunset/sunrise, kids at play, pets, candlelight, and indoor flash prohibited locales like museums and school plays. Aimed right at the sweet spot of parenthood.

Took the camera out with me today to grab some shots and see how it plays out in the real world. Number 1: I love the camera’s speed. I have twin 4 year old daughters, getting them both looking the same direction and smiling can be a challenge. But with the K100d it is a breeze to just keep shooting and shooting figuring at least one picture will just rock. I got a dozen excellent shots today. When we kick this over to the blog and more formal review, we’ll post samples of some of the images.

Picked up some excellent macro shots of fresh picked roses. Clear enough to capture the sheen on the petals. Played a little bit with focus depths and with capturing a sunset sky. Limited by my own skill the camera’s images are stunning.

Okay, you want to read more technical detail here are some useful links:
pentax k100d user manual

Pentax k100d Product Specifications

So far I love the camera. Images are crisp and clean, shake resistance works like a charm, and you can snap lots of images quickly.

My only disappointments so far:

1. I really need a longer lens to get decent images of downtown, sunset etc.

2. I wish I could also take video. My cheap little minolta lets me spin a dial and catch a minute or two clip of decent resolution video. so lots of times i don’t even carry my video camera. the K100d certainly could be engineered to do it, but it just isnt there. Probably enough to keep me from standardizing on this as my main family camera.