Taking a cruise along San Andreas Rd. Shot at around 6:30PM with about an hour or so left until Sunset.

Using the Aiptek A-HD at 720P 30FPS ~4Mbps attached to a GorillaPod SLR which was clinging to the dash of my Subaru. It was very shaky but speeding it up somewhat helped.

Edited with Sony Vegas 7 and rendered to 720P WMVHD at 6Mbps.  Original footage was 30 minutes.  Sped it up to a little over 7 minutes.

The fixed lens helps out when shooting from a car. The Aiptek is not meant for motion though.

Looking into a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 with its 60FPS 720P mode.

Song is Master of Puppets by Metallica performed by Apocalyptica.

Download source 720P WMVHD video (328.66MB)

I’ve been playing around with the Aiptek A-HD and a bit with the Flip Video Ultra and I’m disappointed with the CMOS sensor. It creates the typical ‘wobble’ effect. characteristic of digicams. I know the higher end HD cams from the big 3 (Sony, Panasonic, Canon), don’t have that effect with their CMOS sensors, but we’re talking about cheap webcam parts strung together and hope the chip is smart enough to figure it all out.

What appeals me with the Aipteks are the technical features, solid yet cheap build, and price to go with them. For $130, I have a 720P cam that produces H.264 video at around 4Mbps. I won’t feel bad bring an Aiptek along while surf fishing. If I end up catching the big one and have to sacrifice a cam to the Ocean, then so be it, I could always grab another.

I will always strive to be at the place where I can have a nice balance of a solid build, high tech, and portability. So, now, I’m looking a step up. Sanyo’s.. Or perhaps a Panasonic HCD-HD9 (not very durable or portable). I’m leaning toward the Sanyo HD700 though. Pocketability (!) is fairly important.

The Sanyo E1 is very appealing as well. It’s freaking water proof. You can submerge the MoFo 5 feet deep and it’ll record all that in at 640×480 using the H.264 codec. It’s a bit bulky though. I cruised over to Fry’s and compared the E1 to the C6 , which has the same build as the CG65 and HD700; the E1 is pretty huge in comparison, but it does look durable.

What’s lacking for these cheaper hybrid cams.. are the essentials to compete as a heavyweight in the camcorder field.

Let’s see:

• Opitical Image Stabilization (OIS). Much better than EIS (Electronic Image Stabilization).
• Auto/Manual Focus. Fixed lens cams have their use. For day-to-day use, autofocus is convenient. The option for manual focus is gold.
• Optics. The big players (Sony, Panasonic, Canon) all focus on their optics #1 priority. They don’t bother with cheap webcam parts. I love the pistolgrip form-factor, but it’s tough to combine a huge lens and portability. The big 3′s solution for their flash based cams are bullet shaped. House the best optics and ergonomics goes out the window.
• Standard? This is one to argue about. Sony and Panasonic are going AVCHD which has caused a bit of trouble for those trying to edit video with both Mac and PC. Every format seems have trouble working with your favorite video editor though. Basically, most people have trouble even playing 1080p/720P H.264 footage since it’s so demanding. The thought of them even editing HD footage is a shiny new computer, long, far.. away.
  For me, Sony Vegas has worked well. For you videographers/vloggers using digicams, MP4Cam2AVI has been gold for converting video to an editable format.
  Installing ffdshow also helped in viewing/editing video with the preinstalled Windows Movie Maker.

I found a clone of the GorillaPod at Circuit City earlier, the Sunpak PicturePlus FlexPod.  Man is this fun to play with.  It’s like a puzzle.  Forming the spider-like legs to bend and grasp to any form.  Warning:  You may look at your camera as a pet after connecting additional limbs.  It kind of brings back the same feeling of playing with LEGOS.

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Click To Play

Sat at the bowling alley with U810 and edited with Sony Vegas. Rendered to 320×240 512kb/s WMV.

Download WMV
Download MPEG4

The raw files are 1280×720, 30FPS, h.264 quicktime .MOV files at around 4Mbps. I first had to run MP4Cam2AVI to get Sony Vegas to recognize the audio. It didn’t matter since all the audio was blown out. One cool thing I found out after shooting this. You can plug the A-HD into an Xbox 360′s USB port and it’ll play the video in full 720p. It thinks the A-HD is a normal USB drive/camera. It’s convenient since you don’t have to mess with component cables. You can use the Xbox 360 to view the video you just took.

I used Sony Vegas to edit the footage. At first I encoded to avi using the raw HDV 720P 30FPS profile. Quicktime didn’t like the .avi it produced though. I ended up encoding the file using the 6Mbps, 720p, WMVHD profile.
Quicktime wouldn’t read that either so I ended up encoding the WMVHD file with Nero Recode. I encoded it to a 480×272, 2Mbps, h.264, mpeg4 file. Not sure if it’ll play on an iPhone but we’ll see. UPDATE: Nope. iTunes didn’t want to copy it to the iPhone.

I uploaded the WMVHD file and h.264 file to blip.tv. Here’s the flash video they produced after uploading.

Click To Play

I ordered a SDHC card for my Aiptek A-HD cheapass hybrid camera from Newegg.com a few days ago. It came earlier today and it works!

It’s an ADATA 8GB Class 6 SDHC card that put me back $64.99. You may be able to read how much video I can record now..

That’s right. 4 hours, 23 minutes, and 9 seconds of 1280×720, 4Mbps, 29.97 fps, h.264 footage. Not bad!

Ok round 2. Going to try to upload one of the raw clips taken from the Aiptek A-HD. h.264, 1280×720, 29.97 FPS, 4 Mbps.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

UPDATE:

Well that worked. Next time, no inline player. Link to flash is better. For the iPod version, I’ll use Quicktime instead so the file will play on the iPhone through Safari. Not sure what to do for encoding to 720p though. Maybe have to render to a raw 720p file and then encode with Nero Recode or Quicktime.

Edited and rendered to h.264 (MainConcept AVC/AAC), 1280×720, 29.97 FPS, 4Mbps, 48K AAC.

iPod version is h.264, 640×480, 1Mbps.

Also testing cross-posting to my blog. Uploading both 720P & iPod versions. Hopefully Blip.tv posts this nicely.

UPDATE:
Well, that failed badly. The MainConcept encoder rendered badly, blip.tv’s conversion to flash forgot to include the video, and it seems both h.264 iPod & 720P versions of the video aren’t streaming. The crossposting worked but just added the flash version. No links to the original footage. It added some garbage characters. Will try again later.

Here’s the blip.tv link to the video. Try downloading files instead of streaming.

Aiptek released the A-HD 720p (1280×720) SD based camcorder for $170. Wow. I thought their GO-HD was cheap since you can find them for around $230 these days.

I’ve been a fan of Aiptek since I bought the MPVR a while back for $80. I know, the quality isn’t all that great.. but for that price, it was a steal. A really small, flash based, no-moving parts, beat up camera you can take anywhere is super handy. When going surf fishing, the only device I take with me is the Aiptek since I really don’t care if it gets thrashed. I don’t how many times I’ve dropped it with no sign of damage.

The design if this new model looks very similar to the Sanyo SD camcorders. It definitely looks more compact and slimmer than the MPVR or GO-HD.

I don’t think you can call these new Aiptek HD camcorders hybrids anymore though. The MPVR is a camera, digital camera, webcam, video recorder, video player, and MP3 player. The A-HD and GO-HD are just digital cameras and camcorders now.

Here are the specs taken from Amazon Aiptek. (EDIT: Amazon’s specs are for the GO-HD) The main difference from the GO-HD is the removal of optical zoom and LED light. It encodes to h.264 at around 4Mbps. With an 8GB card, you should be able to record around 4 hours of footage. I hope the battery life is better than GO-HD’s 30 minutes.

Via Engadget
Review by fishycomics @ Steve’s Digicams Hybrid Digicams forum
Amazon.com product page
Aiptek product page
UPDATE: $149.99 @
Circuit City