If simplicity is the key to mainstream sales, this has a really good chance. RCA is bending over backwards to pitch this as a point-and-shoot video system anyone can use.
Designed to be carried along on any trip and always at hand, the RCA Small Wonder eliminates many of the complaints consumers have about conventional camcorders. There are no tapes or discs to buy with the camcorder’s built-in memory, and standard AA batteries mean no batteries to charge with this convenient home video product.
Recorded VGA-resolution video is archived as clips that consumers can play back on the RCA Small Wonder’s 1.5-inch LCD screen, and unwanted clips can be deleted with the touch of a button. The 30 frames per second video files are created as MPEG4 compressed Audio Video Interface files, a format that can also be easily manipulated.
What do you think? Too simple?
AA batteries – that thing will suck up the juice! Other than that, tho, looks promising.
…standard AA batteries mean no batteries to charge with this convenient home video product.
There goes their “green” rating… or am I reading too much into “no batteries to charge” – since rechargeable AAs can be used?
2. do consumer level video editing packages edit MPEG4? I don’t think that is common, yet.
In-camera editing will probably handle about 90 – 95% of what people want to do. It is when you want to do cross-fades, titles, etc that software would be needed.
This is just the commercial version of the CVS Camcorder ($30) that was hacked last year.
I think this was covered on DL.TV recently. It seems pretty appealing.
Nice idea, however it will be totally pointless to market it to the same crowd that buys semi-decent digital cameras. Why?
Well my Casio Exilim Z850 has all the features of this, and more, plus it takes awesome 8mp photos.
However it is a lot more expensive (like $500), but my point is that given how fast prices drop, and given that the digital camera market is huge, they are going to have to up the specs and quality of the video pretty fast otherwise there will be products out there in around a year that do all of this and more.
The Archos Gmini402cc is better, it’s got a 20GB harddrive to store the 640×480 Mpeg4 video on and can be used as perfect DivX/mp3 player.
And it’s available at 247$
The version without the camera is only 149$ or 99$ for Dish Networks customers.
..always at hand
Top of every voyeurs wishlist?
These little cameras are great for all kinds of projects. They can be taken apart and stripped down to their basic components and still operate. People have put the CVS cameras in model airplanes, on kites, inside robots etc.
I have been hoping they would come out with a commercial version that would not require hacking. They need to get the price down some more (they should just install an SD slot instead of the 512MB of internal memory for a start).
It’s also a good camera to bring places you would not normally take a good (expensive) dv cam, such as the beach, camping etc.