My Digital Life

My ongoing dilemma, sharing my digital pictures while traveling

In my continuing research to find a good solution for sharing pictures from my Sony digital camera while traveling without a PC (see previous post), I found a German company which makes portable backup and viewing devices targeted to professional photographers. The company is called Jobo. They produce a device (about the size of an iPod), the Spectator which allows for the selective backup and copying of files from CF/MD/SD/MMC/MS memory cards. It also allows you to view of JPEG files on the 2.5" screen or an external TV. The Spectators comes in a 40GB, 80GB, or 120GB model.

The Spectator would allow me to selectively copy pictures from my Sony camera's Memory Stick to the Micro SD card used in my AT&T Tilt via the internal hard disk. I would then share the pictures using the Kodak Gallery email service using Exchange ActiveSync on my Tilt. I could also use the Spectator as a backup for my camera and not have to worry about running of space on my 4GB Memory Stick.

I priced the 40GB model for $245 at Adorama.com (link). A little pricey for a single purpose device and would mean traveling with another device but it would help solve my dilemma. It is really too bad Apple has discontinued development and support of their iPod camera adapter. It would be a great a great accessory for the iPhone or Touch. Maybe a third party will step up after the iPhone 2.0 firmware is released...I can only hope.

The Jobo Spectator, it won't win any design awards but it is a utilitarian device.

My continual vacation dilemna - emailing pictures from my digital camera

As I am getting ready to take a vacation at the end of the month and wireless Internet access has becomes fairly ubiquitous, emailing pictures from your digital camera should be getting easier. I finally have gotten the whole family to understand and use the Kodak EasyShare gallery. Everyone knows how to upload and share their pictures. Using Adobe Photo Elements, the task is mindless, although in 6.0 the function is buried in other sharing options. Adobe wants you to use their service, but give them credit they kept the Kodak Gallery function. On vacation however I don't want to lug my laptop, I want to be able to transfer pictures from my camera to my PDA, email them to Kodak (save@kodakgallery.com), and share them via their paying mobile web site which I only subscribe when I need it ($2.99 / month). I detailed my approach to making this work back in 2006 (link).

In some way the process had gotten easier with cameras which provide WIFI functionality, however it looks like Nikon, Sony and Kodak are letting those models die on the vine. They must have been a bust. I was never attracted to them because I felt they offered too little on the camera end and the price was too steep.

The other choice is to use an Eye-Fi SD card which provides WIFI capability as well as storage. This is actually a very nice option if you have a camera that accepts SD cards, unfortunately my Sony cameras don't.

It looks like my option remains the process I developed in 2006.  I would love to use my new HD camcorder which also takes 6.1MP stills (Sony HDRCX7). It is a very compact and lightweight flash based camcorder with a 10X optical zoom. I originally bought it for video reviews, but found that the 6.1MP still picture quality was excellent and having the 10x zoom provided great flexibility. Unfortunately, Sony left out all of the still photo editing/sizing features I have in the DSC-W70 and the USB interface is not recognized by the Delkin USB Bridge. The second upgrade I wanted to make to my process was to use my iPhone to email the pictures to Kodak. The Delkin USB Bridge won't recognize the iPhone either. I have an iPod Camera adapter which works great with my 5th generation iPod, however it looks like Apple has stopped supporting this accessory. The new iPods, Touch, and iPhone all pop up an unsupported accessory message. This is really too bad because it is a valuable backup tool for your camera on trips.

So here I am in 2008 with new gadgets which I cannot use the way I want unless I bring my laptop. I guess people wait until they return from vacation to share their pictures or use the lousy cameras in their phones to email while on their trips. I don't want to bring my laptop, maybe I need to look at UMPCs but they are all so expensive. Tabletkiosk has a new one, the eo UMPC v7110e which looks very attractive. Maybe I will get a chance to review it before deciding to pluck down the hefty $1000 entry price. Or better yet try out the Eye-Fi SD card which more in my budget range...

I may just use my Sony DSC-W70 and my AT&T Tilt, I know that combination works and the cheapest solution.

Nothing seems simple these days or is it just me...

The week of October 29th in My Digital Life

Last Saturday, I received a Verizon Samsung SCH-i760 Windows Mobile phone to review for pocketnow.com. This phone has an interesting form factor with a numeric phone keypad on the front and a sliding qwerty keyboard. It has a 400MHZ processor and will be an interesting comparison to my T-Mobile Wing's 260MHZ overclocked processor. This will be my first video review. The video reviews are usually made up of 6 clips lasting about 3 minutes. They detail the aspects and operation of the device. I posted the  first in the series (the unboxing) today at pocketnow.com. This is an interesting medium, which requires more practice on my part...I am using my Sony DSC-W70 7.2 MP still camera to shoot the videos. I am consistently amazed at the quality of the videos it takes.

I finally finished my comparison of Windows Live Search 2.5 and Google Maps applications for Windows Mobile. During the process, I was amazed how much better Windows Live Search was than Google Maps. The article should get posted shortly on pocketnow.com.

These days it seems Apple makes news every couple of days. Today, the Wall Street Journal had article about Apple's new policy on the sale of iPhones. They will no longer accept cash and are limiting purchases to 2 units per person (the previous limit was 5). They are trying to stem the flow of sales to resellers. Tim Cook, Apple's COO mentioned in a conference call with analysts last week that Apple estimates that out of the 1.4 Million iPhone solds, 250,000 were purchased by customers intending to hack them (a fairly significant number). The iPhone dev team has finally put together a simple method to jailbreak version 1.1.1. Instructions can be found here. I may restore via iTunes this week and try it.

This week:

• Work on part 1 and 2 of my video review of the SCH-i760.
• Finnish a review of the iqua BHS-303 Bluetooth headset. Bluetooth headset are getting better and better, this one is quite impressive so far
• I am also adding a Sirius satellite receiver to my BMW. After my navigation computer and radio tuner upgrade, this should be plug and play. The real work will be installing the antenna inside the X5's rear spoiler, but the X5world instructions are excellent.

The week of November 27th in My Digital Life

Every time I drive down I-95, cellular data connection seems to get better and better. Other than the analog modem speed associated with Edge and GPRS, the connection was very reliable. Some day we will have 3G speeds which will be great, but the current technology is definitely usable. It is interesting to note that the FCC has authorized carriers to start pulling the plug on their analog cell networks starting in January 2008 and the unintended consequence is the disabling of older in car emergency response systems like On Star which rely on the analog cell system.

Sony had another bad week with the recall of some of their Cyber Shot cameras, on top of the massive laptop battery recall and delays with Play Station 3, this has not been a good year for them. The models affected are the DSC-F88, DSC-M1, DSC-T1, DSC-T11, DSC-T3, DSC-T33, DSC-U40 and DSC-U50. More information can be found here. I am glad it does not affect my DSC-W70.

It looks like Apple is about to lock up the Beatles' music catalog from a CNN Money story here. As part of the article a Fortune article on Zune is also mentioned. I was surprised not find any Zune advertising in the Thanksgiving/Black Friday news paper advertising sections, however on Sunday Sears had Zune front and center in their circular. They were associating Zune with the Xbox 360 which I think is an excellent move. Narrowing the market segment should help Zune sales.

Still no sign of Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007. I am not sure what the hangup is.

Items I am working on this week:

• I will discuss Acronis' True Image 10 Home backup software on my Media Center.
• I will discuss Diskeeper 2007 I installed on my Lenovo X41 Tablet.
• I am starting a review of Soyo' s FreeStyler HS11 Bluetooth headphones.

Hopefully my review Mobility Electronics (Think Outside) Sierra Bluetooth keyboard will be published on pocketnow.com this week...

My Sony DSC-W70 5 months later

Five months later I still extremely happy with the DSC-W70, it is not perfect but it comes close. Overall, the initial impression I posted here back on July 5th still applies. Here are some additional pros and cons:

Additional Pros

• The size and weight are perfect for traveling.
• The screen size works well for viewing pictures and movies.
• Excellent picture quality (people are impressed with the picture quality)
• Excellent video quality (same here, people are amazed that this camera can take decent videos)

Additional Cons

• The camera's sensor does not deal well with too much light. The results are streaks in the image, which can be seen on the view finder. Adjusting the camera's position solves the problem 99% of the time. It seems that the camera's sensor was designed for low light with an ISO capability of 1000, and it does not handle bright light situations well.
• The inability to zoom in video. The video quality is excellent, however it would be very nice to be able to zoom.

The lack of aperture priority has not bothered me, although it might help with the bright light situation. Now that I have found Adobe's Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Sony's Vegas 6.0 Video editing application work well together, I can easily create DVD photo shows of my travel memories (see my discussion here).

I just noticed that the price of the camera as dropped to around $224. When Sony allows a price drop like this, it usually signals the end of a model. This is probably because the DSC-W100 is basically the same camera with 8 mega pixel sensor, however it sells for $299. At $224 the DSC-W70 is really tough to beat.

All of my posts related to the DSC-W70 can be found here.

Integrating still photos, videos and audio into a photo show - Part 3

Link to Part 1 and Part 2.

I received the Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Premiere Elements 3.0 bundle. I installed both applications (I had to manually uninstall the trial version of Photoshop Elements).

So far I am very impressed with Photoshop Elements 5.0, it is definitely ahead of the game compared to Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006, however Microsoft has just released their Anniversary edition of Digital Image Suite. Unfortunately, Photo Story is still version 3.0 which means this feature is still behind what Adobe offers. The Slide Show feature in Photoshop Elements 5.0 provides very sophisticated image handling capability and the ability to add videos, however as I mentioned in my previous posts, its ability to manage soundtracks is lackluster and behind what Microsoft offers with Photo Story 3. In order to remedy this issue I purchased the bundled which includes the video editing application Premiere Elements 3.0. The migration of a Photoshop Elements Slide Show to Premiere Elements is performed using one click. Premiere Elements 3.0 is simple to use and provides basic video manipulation and DVD creation. I was able to add soundtracks using aac and mp3 music files from my iTunes library and control the volume of those tracks against narrations and video audio. This is exactly what I was looking for. The creation of DVD menus is a breeze with the ability to automatically create chapters and associated menu elements. I did find the preview to be slow and out of sync, Premiere Elements generated an video card error stating that my preview mode was reset to standard because my video card did not support advanced function. I just installed the ATI X1600 video card so I don't think so. Based on the Adobe user forum this seems to be a common problem when the whole video has not been previously rendered. I went forward and started the DVD creation, the rendering to create the DVD was very very slow. It took almost 4 hours to create a 6 minute DVD. The audio in the end result lacked fidelity and the slide pan/zoom and transitions seemed to be faster than what I had selected in the Photoshop Elements Slide Show function. I went back to the Adobe support forum and found 2 threads addressing the slowness of the product with advice to use Premiere Elements 2.0. It looks like Premiere Elements 3.0 is not ready for prime time. How a company could release a video editing product that renders a DVD so slowly is beyond my comprehension. I do have to say that everyone loves Premiere Elements 2.0 and a post urged me to try it. But 3.0 really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially since I tried Sony's Vegas 6 video editing application. The Sony Vegas 6.0 application is more advanced that what I need, but it works very well (I created my 6 minute DVD in less than 15 minutes), I decided to return my Adobe Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements bundle. Given the integration between Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements It is too bad they could not get Premiere Elements to work correctly. I went ahead and purchased Sony's Vegas 6 and will purchase the Photoshop Elements 5.0 upgrade.

The process to create a DVD slide show works as follows:

1. Create Slide Show in Photoshop Elements
2. Output to .wmv file
3. Import .wmv file in Vegas 6
4. Add and manipulate soundtracks
5. Create DVD menus in DVD architect (this is not as easy as in Premiere Elements)
6. Create DVD

In conclusion, this is not the perfect solution I was looking for, but I think I have come up with a process that creates excellent quality DVD slide shows of our travel memories.

The week of November 6th in My Digital Life

One more week and 1 day until Zune is released. I just received an ad from Micro Center featuring Zune. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft is able to generate consumer buzz, until now it has been somewhat lackluster.

I installed my new ATI Radeon X1600 card and the additional memory without a hitch. The X1600 is clearly geared toward dual monitors. Comp USA and Circuit City are selling the Samsung SyncMaster 204B 20.1" LCD monitor this week for $309.99 (with rebate). Looks like a very good deal that I may have to check out.

Items I am working on this week:

• I completed my evaluation of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, Premiere Elements 3.0 and Sony's Vegas 6.0b this weekend. I will post my impressions tomorrow. Here is part 1 and part 2 of that evaluation.
• I will post an update on my 3 month experience with SunRocket.
• I will post an update on my 5 month experience with the Sony DSC-W70 camera.
• I will publish a list of the MDA software I currently use.

My review of the Mobility Electronics (Think Outside) Sierra Bluetooth keyboard should appear late this week or early next week on pocketnow.com.

The week of October 30th in My Digital Life (although it's now November 2nd)

This week has gotten away from me, it is already Thursday and no time for blogging. 12 days until Zune's goes on sale in the US. It will be very interesting to see what happens with Zune, the iPod seems to have such a lead and is now ingrained in popular culture. I am not sure that any product will be able to gain any substantial market share, unless Apple's falters in some way. Analyzing SanDisk's success with their mini player, if Zune's is able to garner a 10% market share over the next year, I think it will be a success. However, I would strongly suggest that Microsoft add WIFI syncing. Just about everybody connected to broadband now has a WIFI network, it is hard to believe they did not include this feature in V1.

I am getting my Windows XP desktop/file server ready for the imminent release of the corporate version of Vista. From my research, I found three critical components for a system to take to full advantage of Vista. They are:

• Current generation processor (Intel P4 or better)
• Minimum 1GB memory, 2GB is better
• Video card capable of running DirectX 10 (if you want the latest graphic capabilities - Aero) with a minimum of 256KB on board memory

I built my own machine a couple years back with a 2.4GHZ P4 on an Intel D865PERL mother board with 512KB memory, an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 AGP video card with 128MB on board memory and a 160GB SATA RAID 1 disk array. The system performs very well, I keep it on 24 x 7 sharing files and iTunes media with my wife's and my laptops. To prepare for Vista I have decided to:

• Add 2GB of PC3200 memory (from newegg.com for $224.99)
• Replace my ATI AIW 9800 video card with an ATI Radeon X1600 PRO AGP with 512MB on board memory. This was one of the few AGP cards certified for Vista. ATI currently has a trade in deal where you can send in your old video card and receive a $50 rebate. I am trading in an old RAGE video card. The X1600 PRO AGP sells for $199 minus $50 trade in will equal $149. I will then sell my AIW 9800 on ebay reducing my cost further. I am loosing the ability to encode analog video with the X1600, however I never thought the quality from my HI 8 and VHS tapes was very good. Could be the card or the source. My choice is to buy a video encoding card or have the conversion done professionally. Professional conversion has gotten so cheap and the quality is excellent, I might just convert a subset of my videos.

For less than $300 I should be ready for Vista. On the horizon, I will probably look to purchase a 3.2GHZ 478 socket P4 later on if Vista seems to be slow and replace my 19" tube monitor with a couple 20" LCD monitors.

I received Adobe's Photo Elements 5 with Premiere Elements 3.0. I had to uninstall the trial version of Photo Elements 5, but so far so good. It looks like I can manipulate the soundtracks the way I want. I will complete my evaluation this weekend.

pocketnow.com is giving away five copies of Fizz Weather I reviewed last week. This is a very useful Windows Mobile application and has become a standard part of my Pocket PC application library.

Integrating still photos, videos and audio into a photo show - Part 2

Link to Part 1.

Back from Scotland I decided to start putting together my slide show using Microsoft Photo Story 3. My wife and I went through the 400+ stills and videos to pick the relevant shots that best describe our time in Scotland. I started the insert process to find that I could not insert Mpeg video clips. Photo Story 3 does so much for you in picking transitions between shots, adding zoom and pan to still pictures, and creating an electronic music soundtrack. It really is incredibly easy to use, however in its quest to minimize the amount of options Microsoft left out what I think is a extremely important feature: the ability to insert video, In order to insert video I had to export the photo story to a Windows Media file (.wmv) and import it into another simple to use free program; Movie Maker which is included in Windows XP SP2, . With Movie Maker I was able to easily insert Mpeg videos, add titles and manipulate the soundtrack. However the quality of the still images with zoom and pan degraded considerably when compared to the video content. This made the end product look rather fuzzy, I was not satisfied with the results and went looking for other solutions.

After a quick search, I found that there were only a two solutions that seem to integrate still pictures and videos. The recently released Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Apple's iPhoto/iVideo. I went to our local Apple store to check out iPhoto and iVideo, the products look good, however they are not that intuitive to use. Apple does an outstanding job in the industrial design of both product and user interface, however the function flow in their application leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe if you are an Apple aficionado it makes sense, but the mouse control and menu nomenclature is not intuitive. I am very intrigued by the Intel Mac (it really was a brilliant decision on Apple's part) and being able to boot both Windows and Mac OS, but I can't justify spending the money. Maybe when Vista drivers along with a good virtual PC capability to run Vista and Mac OS concurrently are available. I also found numerous posts from Mac forums that clearly gave the edge to Adobe's Photoshop Elements over Apple's iPhoto. I decided to download the Photoshop Elements 5.0 30 day trial.

Photoshop Elements 5.0 is as intuitive to use as Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006. For basic and intermediate photo editing reviewers have given both of these products high marks for quality, organization and simplicity. However, the Adobe Slide Show application, which correlates to the Microsoft Photo Story application, is much more powerful. You can see this right off with the ability to control each slide's time and to chain identical slide together to create very creative pan and zoom effects. You can also add Mpeg videos. At this point I am thrilled, although not happy I needed to purchase another product. I created my slide show easily, unfortunately when it came time to add a soundtrack I was dismayed at the lack of options. You can only import mp3 and wma files. What happened to aac? It hard to understand that a product team would omit aac in today's iPod world. I understand Microsoft not implementing aac but I don't understand why Adobe would not. As I dug deeper it became clear that the audio capability is pretty lame. It only allows you to create a single audio track, and even though you can add narration to slides, there is no way to control the volume of the audio track against the narration. To be fair I have not yet tried Adobe Premiere 3.0 video editing program (I could only download a trial copy of Premiere 2.0). Premiere 3.0 can be purchased with Photoelements 5.0 as bundle. The documentation refers to a link which passes content from Photoelement to Premiere for final editing and DVD creation. I found a comment on a forum pointing to using Sony's DVD editing suite Vegas 6. I have downloaded a 30 day trial. It is a very sophisticated editing suites allowing you to create multiple audio tracks which you can control individually. It imports aac tracks and I was able to create the soundtrack I wanted. I don't really want to spend the $86, however I have to say that it is a bargain and seems rock solid, although the preview was always lagging the audio. The DVD I created with it came out very well. I did have to use Nero 6 to create the DVD from a .wmv file, the trial does not allow direct DVD creation.

Using Sony's Vegas 6 was a tangent so I could complete slide show. As an amateur tool, I am very impressed by it, but I don't do enough video editing to justify the $86 expenditure. After reviewing Adobe's 30 day return policy I am ordering the Photoelement 5.0/Premiere 3.0 bundle to see how it fares...Hopefully I should receive it next week.

Go to Part 3.

Integrating still photos, videos and audio into a photo show - Part 1

As part of the ritual of saving travel memories over the years I have gone from single lens reflex film based still photography to Hi 8 video to point and shoot digital still photography. In my goal to carry less while traveling I have made compromises, the two biggest have been the lack of decent zoom capability and the poor video quality of digital point and shoot cameras. Over 25 years I owned only 2 single lens reflex cameras the Canon TLB and the A1 along a myriad of Canon FD lens. The A1 was a fabulous camera, but over time the bulk got to me. Along with the laptop and the Sony Hi 8 video camera, it just got to be too much, so I decided to try digital photography with an Olympus 2.1 mega pixel camera. It was my first point and shoot, the picture quality was decent but could not compare with A1 and the video feature, although advanced for its time was unusable. I also had problem with the size of the camera, my goal was to carry a point and shoot in my pocket and the Olympus did not fit. As the pixels ratcheted up and prices came down I decided to try the 5.1 mega pixel Sony DSC-P10. Great size, very good picture quality (almost equal to the A1), better video but not yet good enough to use on anything but a PC monitor. With the DSC-P10, I started experimenting with digital slide shows. After trying several applications that are no longer around, I settled on the Microsoft Digital Image Suite (it had another name when I started using). Microsoft was ahead of the game when it came to creating slide shows. Photo Story 3 ,which can now be downloaded for free here, is extremely intuitive and produces decent results with the ability to easily add an electronically generated soundtrack. Sound is key to producing a more enjoyable experience for our forced viewing audience, remember the dry 35 mm slide shows and 8 mm movies we had to sit through in our youth.

Back in June of this year before a trip to Scotland, my wife and I discussed taking the old video camera with us. I balked at carrying an extra piece of gear and decided to go examine the available technologies. I settled on another point and shoot camera, the Sony DSC-W70 (see my entries on it here). One of the key reasons from picking the DSC-W70 was its ability to create decent quality video at a 640 x 480 resolution and 30 frames per second. I am very impressed with the quality of the video and this feature is great while traveling. It is great to have one device to shoot excellent 7.1 mega pixel still pictures and very good quality videos, good enough to show on a television. It does not have all the manual adjustments of my previous cameras, but for the price it is tough to beat and it produces excellent quality stills pictures As good as my A1.

I came back from out trip to Scotland with almost 400 still pictures and about 20 minutes of video, now I needed to assemble them together into a coherent story using Microsoft's Photo Story 3.0.

Go to Part 2.