|
Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2008-05b
You can smell the Brickyard from here & other news
Video or still, it's time for your thrill Here's an open call to review the Litepanels Micro ($300) as a better choice for your video or still camera than anything you use in their hot shoes now. For camcorders, you get more light that lasts longer on fewer batteries; that's certainly true in regard to any built-in camera lights, either completely or mostly true (because there are some very bright alternatives that cost more or don't run so long on a set of batteries) for add-on lights. For a digital SLR, you get a light you can both model with & (given the high effective ISO speed of today's gear) shoot with. Is that an exaggeration? Only one way to tell: contact Ken for one to review. Contact: Ken Fisher, LITEPANELS, INC. (North Hollywood CA) 818-332-3070 mailto:ken@litepanels.com http://LitePanels.com
Zoom fan demand creates aftermarket The Zoom H2 handheld recorder ($199) - really more of a complete handheld surround recording studio - has been a hit with audio, radio, even film & TV people since it launched, but fame is not without a price. The price in this case is the challenge to come up with cases & other aftermarket products to help make the H2 even more productive. There's a new silicone jacket protective cover ($15) that slips on like a second skin to fend off the bumps & bruises of working where the sounds are sourced. New Zoom skins ($7) add some custom color touches to help personalize your H2. A mike-clip adapter ($10) screws into the tripod screw mount on the bottom of the H2; it looks like a tapered cylindrical handle, but look again & you'll see it's the shape of the shank of a handheld mike, which lets audio pros mount an H2 almost anywhere a mike might go. If you're not one of the H2 user crew, you know what to do: ask Mark. Contact: Mark Wilder, SAMSON TECHNOLOGIES (Hauppauge, NY) 631-784-2200x142 mailto:mwilder@samsontech.com http://SamsonTech.com
How Tekkeon gear helps make green gear greener Environmentally friendly power sources (wind, tide, solar, etc.) may be good for the planet, but they're not consistent, at least not on their own. Now we're learning that some clever Tekkeon customers are using Tekkeon packaged power products as a buffering power bank to add consistency to the mix. The first application used the output of a solar array as a charging source for the Tekkeon product, which in turn provided consistent output power even when little things like clouds or the shadow of the planet (night time) got in the way. Ask René. Contact: René Williams, TEKKEON, INC. (Tustin, CA) 949-360-7770 mailto:rene@tekkeon.com http://Tekkeon.com
Wi-Ex for cops who aren't behind bars Marty's home township just built a new police station & his pal the Chief became very interested in several Wi-Ex products. He immediately used a signal strength meter to map out the CEL & PCS band presence (mostly non-presence) around the station. They're looking at zBoost to bring more bars inside. plus car units for their cruisers & zPersonal for special circumstances that may compel them to spend extra time off-site. While most official communications are via police radio, there's a mix of official & personal cell phones among the officers; there's nothing mixed about the message that they want & need better coverage. If you want to see how much difference a zBoost, zPersonal or car unit can do for you & your readers, ask the ladies to issue you one. Contact: Sharon Cuppett, WI-EX INC. (Norcross, GA) 770-239-5475x6380 mailto:scuppett@wi-ex.com http://wi-ex.com AGENCY CONTACT: Deanna Anderson 404-759-1890 mailto:danderson705@comcast.net
Droplet Web site invites video conference demo While the main claim to fame for the technology from Droplet Technology is about delivering video at broadcast-righteous frame rates from a cell phone with a still camera & a data plan, an earlier version of the technology is already in use at http://Peerme.com. Now the Droplet Web site invites visitors to go to Peerme to see what that videoconferencing is like. Normally, Peerme offers a 2-party account for free & a 4-party account at a fee, but for press people, Marty can get you around that & John can get you a round-up of where they stand on the cell phone front. Contact: John Ralston, DROPLET TECHNOLOGY (Menlo Park, CA) 650-688-5762 mailto:ralston@droplet-tech.com http://droplet-tech.com Agency contact: Evan Kennedy (Terpin) 310-821-6100x116 evan@terpin.com
Special Report: A pan in the flash People who are pocketbook-serious about photography are the people who buy digital SLR cameras & it's hard to find a digital SLR without a built-in flash, but if you're assuming these people like those flashes, here's a news flash: they hate them. Among the biggest complaints: the flash coverage never quite matches the photo frame; flash intensity tends to have hot spots within the frame; flash illumination tends to create unanticipated reflections & shadows; and, of course, there's red-eye. Built-in flashes have a fixed coverage pattern that doesn't adjust to the angle of view of the lens (some expensive external units have that ability) & doesn't adapt as a zoom lens changes its magnification. Another challenge with flash is that it happens in a flash, so quickly that the eye can never be sure of what the camera just saw; studio pros with expensive gear choose flash fixtures that incorporate modeling lights, continuous lights designed to accurately predict (at a lower intensity) the illumination that the flash will be throwing on its subject. So why not just use continuous lights & make them a little brighter? To some extent, that's happening & we think that practice will be advancing with technology. We don't need to take you all the way back to the era of flash powder in a hod, but it is significant to consider that until a dozen years ago, the only reasonable lights for photo studio use were incandescent (or their halogen cycle cousins); these are power-hungry, burn hot & are absolutely not portable. During the 1990s, fluorescent arrays with improved control over color temperature significantly reduced the power requirement & the heat generation, but these are just as resistant to portability. The new LED arrays we're seeing for video cameras aren't just for video, as it turns out; many innovative still photographers are fitting them to the hot shoe mounts on their digital SLRs with what can only be described as glee. They're getting coverage as useful as a built-in flash but without the unpredictability, hot spots, nasty surprises or red eye without any sacrifice in portability. As LED light output & power efficiencies both continue to improve, it seems obvious that future still camera lights will offer both a medium-intensity modeling mode & a shorter-duration high-intensity burst mode, so even a flash that isn't a flash may still flash.
Special Report Bonus Review: AT&T Navigator It doesn't take long to figure out that the software AT&T sells as AT&T Navigator is authored by TeleNav; while AT&T still sells TeleNav 5.1 for the BlackBerry, AT&T Navigator is "unofficially" TeleNav 5.5. There are some impressive improvements, like a new option to let you speak the name of a place you want to look up, a way to do your lookups on a Web site & sync them to the phone, a way to share locations with others & "push" commute alerts to notify you of quirks along your stored daily commute corridor. There are some curious shortcomings, too; for example, it only allows multi-tap input instead of taking advantage of the smarter & slicker SureType option embedded in the BlackBerry. It doesn't allow saving a found entity to the BlackBerry Address Book. It lost the cool TeleNav "Compass" feature. It keeps the "Record Location" feature that's nifty for remembering where (outdoors) you parked the car. It claims to use AT&T's YellowPages.Com for its searches, but the interface is way different; to its credit, there's a collapsing-outline menu of categories so that, for example, when you search for gas by price you can also search by grade; or you can search for restaurants by the type of menu. (It's useful enough, but it doesn't compel us to delete the separate YP Mobile application). So the feature set is at least semi-cool, but how is it as a navigator? It's adequate. The navigation experience is not materially different from the TeleNav-branded alternative with its sparse maps. Bottom line: AT&T Navigator is a competent BlackBerry GPS navigation solution with some unique features like daily commute nuisance alerts & support for spoken location searches plus enough tie-ins to point of interest, traffic & weather information to be really useful.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Freedom Keychain GPS 2000 It seems that every time we get a new Bluetooth GPS receiver, it's smaller than the last one we got. The last one we got was the size of a slender lighter, the G-sat BT368i, measuring about 2.7"x1.5"x0.4"; then came the Freedom Keychain GPS 2000, about the size of the electronic fob on your car keys at about 1.8"x1.3"x0.6". This is a class II Bluetooth 2 SPP (serial port profile) device with a 30' range. The most fundamental thing to tell you is that it works. It has a slide switch to control power & LED telltales to let you know when it's still hunting satellites, what its Bluetooth is up to & how the battery's doing. After dealing with so many of these little Bluetooth GPS receivers over the past few months, we have some overall observations that are relevant here. First, they all use teensy chips & all seem to use ceramic patch antennas. The biggest difference in their range of small sizes seems to be the size & capacity of the built-in rechargeable battery; the bigger units offer a few more hours of run-time between charges, but even the smallest seems to be good for 10 hours, enough for a typical day's GPS activities. The larger units seem to be (this is subjective, not tested) a little bit quicker at picking up satellites. For the Keychain GPS 2000, we're usually able to get signals indoors when we're not too far from windows, but not always; of course, that's not normally a circumstance where you need to know your GPS coordinates. The Keychain GPS 2000 comes with a short attached chain with a clasp hook you can clip to a key ring or into a purse, sack or briefcase & it works just fine when it's in your pocket. Bottom line: The Keychain GPS 2000 is small enough to always have along with you so even if your need for GPS is unexpected, you're ready & it's able.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: LA Fresh Tech Pack The $5 LA Fresh Tech Pack is a kit of 3 kinds of wipes in those small foil envelopes, all in a zip-sealed plastic carry pouch ("airport security friendly" per the splash on the outer cardboard sleeve). The pack includes 3 lens cleaning wipes (unremarkably isopropyl alcohol), 3 anti-bacterial "travel wipes" (mostly water & ethyl alcohol) & 4 wet/dry pairs of screen cleaning wipes. There's no new tech here. There's easily as much packaging as product. And while none of the three is extraordinarily effective, each is adequately effective. Bottom line: the LA Fresh Tech Pack is a convenient alternative to gathering these several kinds of cleaners from separate sources & a handy way to tote them for travel.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Tellme You know the circumstance: you're driving, can't pull over, can't take your eyes off the road, absolutely need to find & call a location & there's nobody in the car to help. With Tellme on a BlackBerry, you might just survive all that. A click opens the application then you hold down the green call button & speak the ZIP code or the city & state for your search. A large & distinctive animated graphic comes on the screen while its search is in progress. It can find businesses, let you click to call, show you directions to get there, map it & show you the traffic you'll encounter or the weather. We tried speaking in the name of a local coffee-shop chain, "Arabica"; its name is pronounced a-ra-BEE-ka, but we also tried uh-RABB-ikka & a few other alternatives, even spelled it letter by letter, but it took typing it in for the search to come up with any valid results. (we did find it by saying "coffee shop" but going that route seems like cheating). There's supposed to be (per the online description) an ability to isolate a search by using your current location through GPS on a BlackBerry, but that functionality (indeed, that option) isn't anywhere to be found. We're supposed to be able to say "Weather" to get an instant local forecast on screen; when we say it before specifying our location, we get a list of cities with partially homonymic names; when we say it after specifying a location we get a list of businesses with "weather" in their names. Once you spec a location, "movies" brings up a Fandango-sourced list of local theaters & features & show times. When Tellme does find a location, you get several options: You can click to call (with movies, you can click to call for tickets), click for directions (it asks for your starting point), click for a map or click to send the location to a friend. Bottom line: the current version seems a bit iffy, but we like the concept & hope an update will help it come more completely true.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Update - Live Search v.2 We reported on Live Search just a few weeks ago, then at version 1.5; we went to double check it recently & found an update to version 2 with significantly more satisfactory results. It's now fully GPS-conversant, to the point where its "Weather" menu item takes you immediately to the weather at your location. There's a new Web search feature. Most significantly, there's a new option to speak in your query; it responds with a short list of what it thinks you said, letting you scroll & click to get right to it. Like Tellme (from a different Microsoft group), it has trouble with "Arabica" but none at all finding "coffee shop". Bottom line: this improved, updated version of Live Search is now one of the most useful search utilities you can put on a BlackBerry desktop.
Associating press As the newspaper publishing economy continues to squeeze the size of each editorial well, we're noting more major market daily papers returning to an early root practice: running any number of relevant items of interest from reporters at other newspapers. In the early heydays of newspapers, that practice got more organized & became the genesis of the Associated Press & United Press International (et al). If the old practice is returning, we have to imagine that its purpose, at least in part, is to send UPI & AP a message; we can only guess that it's about pricing & policies. Candidly, we like the idea of a reporter's good work escaping the boundaries of his paper's native circulation. To repeat a longstanding belief here: there is a valid, important reason for the separate existence of newspapers, regardless the impact of the Web, but if they're going to survive, it has to be on the basis of their unique strengths, not by pretending to be just like the enemy. Contact: Martin Winston, NEWSTIPS (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400; mailto:marty@newstips.com http://Newstips.com
# # #
Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
|