On our trip to Swami’s Beach to look at the tide pools, I finally tested my Sanyo Xacti E1 under water.
Here is a video of the first time I ever put it under water:
Download this video for your iPod
I got a lot of great footage with the Sanyo Xacti E1. You can see the best of our tidepooling adventure here:
Patrick Norton at Tekzilla Daily had an EXCELLENT guide on how to organize your life with your digital camera. These are some great ideas and you can check them out here:
Here is a quick list of their ideas:
Travel Companion: If you’re visiting an unfamiliar country or city and don’t want to get lost, take pictures of your hotel building as well as the nearby street signs. If you end up getting lost or turned around, try showing these pictures to a friendly local who can point you in the right direction to get back home.
Use Your Camera As A Scanner: If you see important information that you need to jot down like a business card, a white board or a document. With today’s mega-pixel cameras, that image is going to be big and legible enough for you to read all that detailed information from.
History Viewer: Say you’re working on a complex project like repairing a car or remodeling a room with lots of steps and pieces. It can be insanely easy to forget how it goes back together. As you start, take a picture of every step along the way to see how things come apart. Keep doing it as you progress in your work. Take pictures every step of the way. If you get confused about how things go back together, you have a trail of photos that have the answer for you.
In addition to those ideas, I have a couple others:
Use your camera to keep track of your diet: When you are eating throughout the day, take a picture of everything you eat. You can use the photos as a food journal or just as a reminder so that you can keep your written food journal honest and accurate. This works especially well with a camera phone because it’s more likely to be with you at all times.
Comparison Shopping: Sometimes it’s hard to remember which store had the best deal, especially when you are looking for high price items. When you are shopping, take pictures of your favorite choices at each store along with the price tag. When you are at a different store, you’ll have a good idea what the same item cost at the store down the street. Be careful, some stores have policies against taking photos of their merchandise, so either ask permission or be discreet.
There are so many different ways to use your camera to organize your life. How do you use your camera? Leave us your tips in the comment field.
Hi,
I just read your very informative article: Understanding SD Flash Memory Card Speeds.
One thing I’m still confused about is memory card readers — what are they and are they required? Would I be able to copy to my computer, delete, print, etc. just with a USB cable connecting to my computer directly or will I need a memory card reader?
Specifically, I’m thinking of getting a Lexar Platinum II 60x 2GB SD card for my Canon PowerShot a720.
Thank you very much,
Felix
Felix,
Your computer might already have a card reader. If it doesn’t, you can always connect your camera to your computer with the included USB cable. If you want to download your photos directly from your SD card, however, you need a “slot” to put it in. If your computer doesn’t have a SD card reader, you’ll have to buy one.
Best,
Laura Moncur
So if my computer doesn’t have a card reader, I can just use the camera as a sort of card reader by connecting the camera to the computer via USB, and then copying stuff from the SD card? What’s the advantage of getting a card reader?
Thank you
Felix,
The advantages of a card reader are a little nebulous.
Firstly, you don’t have to hunt down the USB cable that came with your camera. Most of those cables are proprietary, so if you lose it, you can’t just find another cable easily.
Secondly, some card readers download the photos a lot faster than your camera will. I’ve never tested your Canon camera, but with my old Canon (6 years ago), the compact flash card reader was MUCH faster.
Finally, sometimes the cameras make it difficult to download the photos by requiring software to be installed. If you have a Mac, I’ve heard that it’s MUCH easier, but sometimes things are a little difficult on a PC.
The most important thing is to download your photos to a computer and make a backup by burning a CD or DVD. That way you won’t lose your most important pictures.
Best,
Laura Moncur
At CES Unveiled, they were also highlighting the winners of the Innovation Awards. I was tickled pink to notice that my Sanyo Xacti E1 is one of the winners!
I talked about the E1 before:
They were showcasing the winners of The Best of Innovations 2008 by having the living statues from the Venetian holding them. Here’s a photo of me taking a picture of him with MY Sanyo Xacti E1.
Here is the photo I took:
If you were wondering what the sign he was holding said, here it is in detail:
Congratulations, Sanyo! You really outdid yourself on the E1 and I love using it every day!
I’ve heard a lot of drooling about the Eye-Fi Card. It’s supposed to be a cool wireless SD card that can upload your photos to the Internet without the use of a laptop. I couldn’t understand why everyone was so excited about it because it looked like a $100 complication, not a simplification. I’m glad to know that my instincts were spot on.
The Eye-Fi has to be configured with each local network you use and you it can only be configured via the Eye-FI USB dongle. Worse the Eye-Fi software can’t play with most hotspots, free and hotel wifi points. So much for photos on-the-go without the laptop which was my primary desire.
The real let-down to me, however, is that the upload from camera to photo sharing site (in my case Flickr) will upload every picture on the card. You cannot limit it to just some. I’m too bad a photographers for that. Also the Eye-Fi currently does not support any of the config settings I use with Flickr, so all titles, descriptions, tags, and groupings have to be done manually at Flickr.com which i find to be time consuming.
It uploads EVERY photo on your card?! That is completely unacceptable to me. There are so many photos that I take trying to get just one good shot. That one good shot goes to Flickr, not the whole collection!
Thanks for the review, Ted. You’ve saved a bunch of people from an expensive mistake.
I wrote about the Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1 before:
I was finally able to get one and what did I do to test it out? I took it to the craft store.
Download this video for your iPod
Everything in a fabric store is so vividly colored that it’s the perfect place to test your camera. I can’t do a better review than Ryanne did back in July. All I can do is show you how pretty the colors are.
Back in April, Phil801 wrote an entry on how to upload your photos from your cameraphone into Flickr. It is something that I have been doing ever since I got a Flickr account, but I realized that not everyone might know how to do this.
Fortunately, Phil801 wrote step-by-step instructions on how to set it up and how to send them out, including information on how to name the photo and tagging.
Flickr will also automatically upload your photos and description to your weblog if you wish. During CES, I used this feature heavily, taking pictures with my camera, putting the card in my Treo and uploading the photo and description to Flicker and The Gadgets Page right from the convention floor. Even photos taken with my atrocious Treo 650 camera are better than no picture at all.
If you have a Flickr account and you haven’t been using these features with your cameraphone, you have a chance to learn how to now. It has made photo-taking an instant sharing adventure.
It’s nice to see that someone else enjoys their Lumix camera as much as I do. I actually preferred the focusing of my older camera, but the DMC-TZ3 has been an excellent video camera and I have used it to film my Starling Fitness DVDs.
It is a fairly popular camera and you can see the kinds of photos people take with it here on Flickr:
The DMC-TZ3 has some limitations. If you are filming in wind, you WILL get wind popping noises on the audio, even if it’s just a slight breeze. I didn’t have this much trouble with the older Panasonics and since it’s a digital camera first and video camera second, I don’t have much room to complain.
I have also had trouble focusing in low light situations. I think it’s because the camera has such an amazing zoom. I’ll gladly trade the focusing for zoom, because it allows me to get video of things like this:
I always have my Lumix with me, so I am able to snap pictures and take video wherever I go. It’s small enough that I don’t begrudge it in my purse. It’s even small enough to tuck into my pocket if I’m taking pictures all day (like I did in Disneyland).
Despite its minor drawbacks, I love my Panasonic Lumix.
Ryanne at Freevlog did an excellent job reviewing the Xacti E1 camera. Since Ryanne is a video-blogger, she gives the camera an exhaustive test. She takes it in the swimming pool. She takes it to the beach. She shows you footage that she has taken with it. Go to the review and watch the video showing how rugged the Xacti E1 is:
I LOVE that she showed the footage from the camera in all sorts of environments. Because it’s a waterproof camera, she showed it in the pool, of course, but she also went to the trouble of showing it in the house, and in really low light situations.
There are a few things that she didn’t mention. One is that the Xacti E1 will take SDHC cards, so you can film up to 80 minutes on a 8GB SDHC card. It has 5X zoom, which isn’t as good as some of the other Xacti cameras. You have to remember, though, that when you’re filming zoomed out, it’s very difficult to get footage above 5X unless you have incredibly steady hands.
It is also a 6 mega-pixel camera in addition to being a video camera. The Xacti E1 is too new, but as soon as people start getting them, the photos that people have taken and uploaded to Flickr will show up here:
Unlike the Sanyo Xacti HD, it does NOT film in HD or in the 16:9 aspect ratio. If that is an issue for you, then you should wait until Sanyo comes out with an HD Xacti that has the same great performance in low light and sound quality.
On the whole, the Xacti E1 just jumped to the top of my wish list, even above the iPhone.
Update: Mike Moon saw Ryanne’s review of the Xacti E1. You’ll remember him as the guy who put his camera into a glass jar and took it into his swimming pool. You can hear his thoughts about the camera here:
I don’t recommending selling one of your children to get an Xacti E1, no matter how good it looks.
You probably have an excellent camera in your cellphone right now. Here is a link to a website that shows you how to take up-close shots (macro) with your cameraphone using an inexpensive magnifying lens.
I am continually amazed at the amazing shots I can get off my old Treo 650. If you have been leaving your camera on your phone alone, go ahead and try it!
Via: iPhone camera as microscope - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
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