On Tuesday 18 September 2007 03:27:24 Mikko Rauhala wrote: > Presumably, this is all due to some sort of petty marketing policy to > intentionally cripple the software on consumer goods with the goal to > increase demand for their other devices. As someone having a clue or at
I've seen many photo cameras with such limitations (Fuji, Canon, the list goes on). I can't guarantee that my experience is valid for all of them, but for at least one I was in contact with, it was actually NOT a marketing policy but a technical limitation. In my case some control lines were multiplexed that made it impossible to use the electronic zoom and video capture at the same time. It seemed that the video recording option was an afterthought and the camera actually handled it as if it was a very long exposure photo but with 25fps sensor readouts during the exposure. If you think about it, from that standpoint it actually makes sense - ordinarily you do NOT expect to change focus or zoom _while_ taking a single photo. Rewriting the firmware, adding more control lines, more parallel functions are all things that should have been done to make it a 'proper' video recording device, but I can't really attribute that to malice, this was a hack to get video recording on a device that was not originally developed to do it. YMMV, some manufacturers might be doing what you say, but some aren't and it's pretty hard to tell from the outside :) _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
