CES: video is coming – and you’ll see things you’ve never seen
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Toys & gadgets, Storage on
Between the queues and the crowds and the firehouse of information, CES quickly turns into a blur. Yesterday things kicked off gently with Logitech announcing new products over a leisurely lunch – a Squeezebox with an iPod-style remote control, a tiny keyboard with built-in scroll wheel for running a media center or driving a presentation, a Bluetooth version of the MX Revolution mouse that gets you through a multi-page PDF more ergonomically and time to chat about trends. The CES Unveiled preview was less a queue and more a moving herd of journalists, grazing on the buffet and crowding past the stands. SSD capacity is going up but prices are still at the level where you have to care a lot about TCO and data safety to find them good value.
One of the points that came up again and again while we were researching future IT trends at the end of last year is that video is coming to business – presentations, training and chat as well as video conferencing. This brings up lots of issues around storage and search and regulatory compliance, but there’s also the question of how good this video is going to look. You can drive a spreadsheet, you can knock together a presentation – but could you edit a video? Video editing is going to get as accessible as image editing soon and Pinnacle is hoping to get market share by giving away a simple video editing package, but technologies like auto-summarising, search and index, facial recognition and embedded metadata are going to take some of the work out of watching video.
HD camcorders are going to get small and cheap this year, but Casio is putting video into a camera in a way that could completely change the way you take pictures. A good digital camera will have a burst mode that’s gets 10 shots in a second; the new 6 megapixel $999 Exilim Pro EX-F1 will take 60. It’s a lightweight EVF model rather than a DSLR, it takes around 300 shots on a single battery charge – and it’s much more likely that those will be the shots you want. You can either shoot away and pick later or preview the shot and choose the frame you want –put the preview in slow motion so you can find it more easily. The flash can’t quite keep up but you can still get 30 frames per second with flash.
Burst mode is great when you’re prepared and pointing the right way but you still have to get your finger on the shutter button. The EX-F1 can pre-record images so that when you press the shutter button it saves a preset number of frames before and after, which does away with shutter lag pretty comprehensively. There’s a five second version on the pocket-sized Exilim s10, which also has an ‘autoshutter’ feature that presses the button for you when the subject isn’t moving, the camera isn’t shaking, the subject is front and centre, the person you’re photographing – or when you make it into the frame after you set the timer.
Casio is using video to get better still images but the EX-F1 can also shoot 1080i HD video at 60fps – or a lower resolution at 300, 600 or 1200fps. That catches motion you couldn’t see with the naked eye and give you the kind of amazing shots you used to only see on TV. When you burst a balloon full of water what you see is the water falling; when you video it at 1200fps you see the water holding the shape of the balloon before it succumbs to gravity. HD video is easier to look at because the detail makes it look more real; high speed video shows you something you couldn’t see otherwise.
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