Spyware The newest camcorders are so slick and small they'd make James Bond jealous. A veteran foreign correspondent tells us which ones are worth taking on the road.
By Christopher Dickey Newsweek Updated: 3:03 p.m. ET April 5, 2006 URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12158549/site/newsweek/ April 5, 2006 - When I was about 13, I wanted to be a spy. I wasn't really sure what spies did, apart from what I'd seen in "Dr. No" and "From Russia With Love," but I knew a big part of the job was having a tiny camera with which to, well, do what spies did. So I saved the money I made from part-time jobs and eventually had just enough to buy a minuscule second-hand Minox camera with a black anodized finish that made it seem that much more like just the thing James Bond might slip into the pocket of his tuxedo. Unfortunately for my fantasy, when I looked in the mirror, I was still just a kid. I've been fascinated with small cameras ever since, though, and have owned several over the years. None were quite as small and or as special to me as that Minox, but many of them took better pictures. During my early assignments as a foreign correspondent covering the Central America wars in the 1980s, I carried an Olympus XA, which used 35mm film and was about the same size as one of the two packs of cigarettes I smoked each day. Now in the digital age (and with my lungs cleared), I've been using a Philips Key019 camcorder, which is about the size of a pack of gum, takes 2-megapixel still photographs and records up to 24 minutes of low-resolution video with sound, which is just a little superior to most run-of-the-mill cell phones. I've also been trying out a bunch of very small cameras that are meant to take higher quality images and video, several of which I'll be looking at here. They are technological marvels, they're already on the market, and, as tools for a reporter, they're like holding a revolution in your hand. Forget "backpack journalism." It's now possible to carry the equipment you need for video, stills and voice recording in the pockets of your jeans. The big challenges in the field are getting to the story, and then figuring how to get the story out. (Getting yourself out may be a bit of a problem, too, in some situations.) With these little digital cameras that record on flash memory cards, you can use laptops with high-speed connections or even go into Internet cafés to send the stuff back to your office. In terms of gadgetry, the James Bonds of yore would envy the digital journalist of today. A note here: some people think spies and reporters do pretty much the same thing, and in one sense, they do. Their business is to gather accurate information. The basicvery basicdifference is not what they report, but to whom they report. The function of a spy is to deliver information to a government with which the government can defend itself. Any bad government will use its spies' information to punish enemies and protect its interests. A worse government uses secret information to enforce tyranny. Journalists report to the public, precisely, to give ordinary people the means with which to make their own independent judgments and defend their own interests, including those threatened by their government. With the new technologies available to everyone, that public information based on original reporting can now be backed up easily with original sound and images. My little Philips camcorder, although almost a toy, gives a good idea of what can be done with these tiny devicesby citizens or professionals. It's essentially a 128-meg USB key, which can also store music and, for that matter, manuscripts. To put photographs and videos onto a computer, no special software is required. All you have to do is plug it into a USB port and click on the files. Unfortunately, Philips seems to have had no idea how to market the thing. Created in 2004, it was discontinued in 2005 and is now only available, sometimes, on eBay or similar sites. Over the last year or so, I used the Philips with adequate results at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, interviewing everyone from the prime minister of Egypt to a Buddhist monk. I also amuse myself by posting occasional still pictures on the Web. When I started trying out potential replacements for this little gadget, I wanted to get higher quality images and sound from something that would still be small enough to carry anywhere at any time. I wanted the video files to be MPEG-4, because that format is highly compressed and I want to send clips by e-mail from borrowed computers if necessary. Ideally, the files would be easily compatible with both Macs and PCs. I also wanted the still images to have good enough resolution to use in NEWSWEEK's print editions, which meant a minimum of 5 megapixels. A lot of good cameras were disqualified quickly because they didn't meet all those rather specialized criteria. The tiny, elegant Sony T9, for instance, doesn't record video in MPEG-4. The very small and durable Samsung Scx105L takes good video but only very low-resolution stills. The Nokia N90 is also a state-of-the art telephone and organizer, but it's heavy, uses up batteries quickly, and costs a lot more than the other devices I looked at. Several new cameras record to hard disks, which is interesting, but not in the right format for my purposes. Many people like the new line of JVCs, but they are too big to meet the jeans-pocket standard. The with a 20-gigabyte internal memory looks interesting, but arrived too late for a full test. None of the cameras I looked at had an interface as simple and easy to use as the Philips USB Key019. Most try to persuade you to use their proprietary software. But all of the ones that got serious trials recorded to flash cards which allow you to load the images onto your computer using a cheap, light little card reader. In the end, with help from my NEWSWEEK colleagues Roisin Timoney, Jonathan Groat and Damien Donck, I narrowed the field to four cameras: the ultrasmall Casio Exilim EX-S600 and the slightly larger Kodak V570, which are basically still cameras that take video; the Sanyo VPC-6, which is a video camera that takes good stills, and the Sony DSC-M2, which is a very strange hybrid that bills itself as a still camera but is also very good at video. Prices listed for these devices range from a little under $400 for the first two, to the $500 range for the latter two. All of these four cameras gave excellent results, and each has a special feature or two that sets it apart: the Casio Exilim's greatest virtue is its size. You can put it in your pocket and forget it's there. It also takes high-quality stills. Some of the people in NEWSWEEK's photo department own Exilims for personal use, which is a real recommendation. For video, the camera is a little hard to keep steady (despite a digital antishake feature) and we found the files had to be converted before we could edit them on a Mac. I am also put off by the fact that the lens extends when the camera is turned on. It looks like a little grit on the sliding tube could make the device grind to a halt. The Kodak V570 was, for several days, my favorite. It has two lenses: one of them a conventional 3X zoom, the other a fixed ultrawide angle. There's a jump when you move back and forth between them, so you shouldn't think of using it for a continuous video zoom. In fact, I kept the camera on ultrawide most of the time because I liked the distinctive look of the images. One interesting extra is the panorama feature, which helps you line up three consecutive wide-angle shots taken left to right or right to left, then stitches them all together in the camera. If you don't keep the camera level, the effects are very strangeand to my taste even more intriguing than the conventional panoramas. (One problem: when I took the memory card to my local drugstore for prints, the machines couldn't handle the panorama shots.) The Kodak's video was decent, although the variation on exposure and focus was a little slow keeping up with pans and zooms. The buttons and menus are intuitive, and literally spell everything out with descriptions on the screen. The problem? Unfortunately, when Damien ran comparative tests in our photo department, the image quality of the Kodak stills was not as sharp as on the other three cameras, nor did it have the kind of detail in shadows he hoped for. The Sony DSC-M2 is a device I want to love, but can't, quite. It looks like it was designed to be small, but it's the biggest and heaviest of the cameras we looked at. I tried out the earlier model, the DSC-M1, last summer and it performed well, but felt like I was carrying a brick in my pocket. The newer model is more ergonomic, but still an uncomfortable fit. The Sony's swing-out viewfinder is large, clear and can be rotated 180 degrees if you want to film yourself and see how you're framed, which is not possible with the Casio, the Kodak or the old Philips. It's also possible to fold the camera to its smallest size with the LCD facing outward so you can view the pictures or videos you've taken and delete what you don't want. The exposure, the focus, and the zoom are all quick and responsive on the Sony, but the various options represented by symbols on the screen sometimes look like an intimidating collection of hieroglyphics. Reading the manual is mandatory for the Sony, as it is not for the other cameras. The Sony video tested well for NEWSWEEK online and the stills were satisfactory for the photo department. But everybody found it annoying that Sony still insists on using its proprietary Memory Stick Duo for storage instead of the much more commonly available and readable Secure Digital Format used by the other three. Of course, if you have a Sony laptop, you may find the Memory Stick a convenience. In the end, I bought the Sanyo Xacti VPC-6. It is just enough smaller than the Sony that it slides easily into a pocket. Its exposure and focus move smoothly, although the full 6X digital zoom sometimes hesitates before sharpening. The controls are intuitive and obvious. A 4-year-old could probably figure them out in 15 minutes. The LCD is not as large as the Sony's but it, too, can be folded flat to view and delete pictures. Equally useful, the Sanyo allows you to film or take pictures while the viewfinder is down, literally shooting from the hip if necessary. Is the Sanyo the last word in flashcard video/still cameras? Certainly not. But it's the best I could find for my purposes right now, and Ive already put it into action during protests in Paris this week, where students are claiming that revolution, like spring, is in the air. Of course, a few people in the crowd may think an American carrying a tiny video camera is some sort of spy. Ah, well. Someday they'll understand that many kinds of revolutions are at work today, and these gadgets are part of them. URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12158549/site/newsweek/ ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
