I got this device which I mentioned previously on this blog for Chanukah, here is my review
My wife got the many, many hints I dropped about the Philips GoGear Key019 Camcorder and got my one for Chanukah. She rules. Here is my review.
This is a pretty cool device as long as you know exactly why you are getting it. This is not a digital camera replacement, nor is it a video camera replacement. If you have a video or camera equipped cell phone, you may not need it. This is a perfect tweener device. Extremely small and portable it is made to be carried around and take those shapshots or quickie videos (WITH SOUND!) that you always mean to take but never have your camera or video camera around for. It makes it perfect for me (see earlier post). It’s small, it feels well made and solid. It is simple to use.
CAMERA MODE
Here are some sample snapshots I took under various conditions. These are all sampled down to fit decently. The camera claims to take 2 mega-pixel images, I think that it is probably more like 1 mega-pixel interpolated, but I’m not sure. I took some shots on a cloudy day and on a sunny day.
Cloudy day pictures:
Sunny Day pictures:
Here was a picture I tried to take in a mirror of the camera this was a moderately lit room, but you can see that the camera doesn’t have a macro setting
Here is my wife by lamp light (60 watt)
As you can see, you need some pretty bright light to take a decent photo. This isn’t too unexpected given that the lens is TINY. The camera works well in well lit situations: sunny days, well-lit rooms, etc… In lower light it gets pretty hard to take a sharp photo of any object. I don’t expect a flash in this form factor and I don’t expect these low light situations to work that great either so that isn’t a major negative in my book.
LITTLE ASIDE
I do have a few specific complaints. One is that the unit doesn’t come with a carrying case. Given that the lens is exposed this is a serious flaw. You don’t want to carry this in your pocket with your keys unless you’ve got something covering the lens. My second complaint is that while it has a microphone and can record audio, there is no audio-only record mode. Given that this is also an MP3 player, that doesn’t make any sense to me. If there is a second generation of this device I would expect that to be rectified.
Now that my complaints are out of the way, there are some things I really like about it. It is small, not as small I thought it would be, but very small, easily carried with you wherever you go. It has a lithium ion battery so that you don’t have to worry about fully discharging it. Additionally, it comes with an extra external battery pack that uses AA batteries, so that if you run out of battery but have some extra memory to use, you can pick up some AAs and keep going before you head back to your computer. The interface is simple and surprisingly featured given its diminutive form factor. There are two modes, recording and playing. When the remote is plugged into the jack, you are in playback mode. Here you can listen to your MP3s and view recorded pictures and videos in its tiny video screen. You can delete individual shots or videos to free up memory if you don’t like them. Without the remote you are in record mode. In record mode if you switch to the MP3 switch you turn the device off, but the other switches are for letting you take a photo or video. Another plus is that while the Camera doesn’t acknowledge OSX as an operating system, I plugged it into my mac and iPhoto recognized the device and grabbed the photos no problem. It’s on the side of my laptop charging as I type. The videos are encoded as Windows-only MPEG4 (Windows Media ASF format) which is a bit of bummer rather than using quicktime which would make the device completely OSX compatible.
MP3 MODE
this keyring line that philips make are mostly MP3 players so it isn’t too surprising that this version has an MP3 player too, but I think it isn’t really that useful given that there is only 128 MB to share between your video, photos and MP3s. I’ve already got two MP3 players so I’m not gonna use this for that. Sorry…
VIDEO MODE
The device writes out its files as MPEG-4 ASF windows files which means that if you want to do anything with your files except play them in Windows Media player, you’ll need to download some shareware converters.
Below is a short clip of two shots I recorded of the same bridge, one on a cloudy day and one on a sunny day. They are short because I decided to have them at the highest resolution I could which meant a big file which meant that I had to keep it short. These were converted from ASF to AVI with a shareware tool and then edited in Premiere Pro 1.5 and exported to a Quicktime MOV with the lowest compression I felt ok with. It won’t give you the exact idea of the quality, but it is pretty close. The titles were obviously added later.
The camcorder works pretty well and I’m actually happy with the video quality given the enormous compression going on. The audio quality isn’t so hot, but the microphone is a tiny dot on the front on the device and I’m sure that they sacrificed the audio quality to get the file sizes down.
CONCLUSIONS
At this price point and feature set this is a device that is not long for this world. From above, high quality digital cameras are getting cheaper and smaller and most of them take some kind of movies now too. From below, cell phones are increasingly incorporating cameras and video recording and they’ve had MP3 playback for a while. But, if you want a tiny device that you can always carry with you to document this weirdness of the world and you don’t want to wait for the technology curve to hit your ideal device this is a pretty awesome little thingy. There are some good user reviews on Amazon now.