Month: August 2005

Study finds slowdown in digital camera sales – The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog – photoshop.weblogsinc.com _: From the Unofficial Photoshop Weblog: “All of you who make your own photographs are well aware that the market has seen a radical shift from film to digital cameras. That’s old news; but the new twist is that the phenomenal growth in digital camera sales may have peaked. A new study has found that there was only a 20% growth in digital camera sales in the first half of 2005 as compared to 50% growth in the first half of 2004. That seems logical, but it may not be the whole story. CNET news quotes Weblogs Inc’s blogger Jay Savage’s observation that the tremendous sales of cell phones with built-in digital cameras need to be taken into account. I’d say Jay is onto something. Not only has photography gone digital, but the very nature of what constitutes a “camera” is changing.”

HD Beat

eHomeUpgrade | SyncToy v1 Beta for Windows XP Interesting. Sean Alexander is talking about SyncToy, the latest tool from Microsoft to manage files and their movement in XP. I always like hearing Hot Donkey! and this just might be Hot Donkey indeed. I will have to download it and check it out this weekend.

“Increasingly, computer users are using different folders, drives, and even different computers (such as a laptop and a desktop) to store and retrieve files. There are new sources of files coming from every direction: digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops. Yet managing hundreds or thousands of files is still largely a manual operation. In some cases it is necessary to move files from one place to another; in other cases there is a need to keep two storage locations exactly in sync. Some users manage files manually, dragging and dropping from one place to another and keeping a mental card catalog in their heads. Others use one or more applications of one sort or another to provide this functionality for them.”

Two of my biggest gripes with my digital media are that 1. I get frequent disc drive errors when backing up large amounts of mp3 files and 2. I don’t know of an easy way to get only my 5 star rated songs on to my laptop. It will be interesting to play around with and see if I can somehow accomplish the two items above with this tool.

Tonx on Flickr has a set of photos up devoted to latte art among all things. Nice. Make mine with a tripple shot of espresso please!

Digital Media Thoughts – Digital Media News & Views Jason Dunn is out with his thoughts on the New Zen Vision portable player by Creative Labs, also a Portable Media Center manufacturer. The Zen Vision is like the PMC except that rather than use the Media Center OS it uses it’s own based on Linux.

“From a hardware perspective, the new Zen Vision looks like it was meant for the Portable Media Center OS – but Creative didn’t go that route, which to me spells trouble for the PMC. With only three partners making the hardware (Samsung, iRiver, Creative), the PMC platform wasn’t exactly on strong footing to begin with. And now, a key partner releases a killer media device that’s not running the PMC OS. Where does that leave the PMC? Unless we see a new release of PMC hardware before the end of 2005, unfortunately I think that leaves the PMC dead in the water.”

I have yet to fully understand the allure of the PMC. Much of this is probably personal preference. For music I have my Audiovox Scoblephone with a 1 gig memory chip and for video I have the much larger screen on my laptop which pretty much comes with me everywhere.

While I could see where a PMC might be a nice hybrid for some, it doesn’t work for me.

eHomeUpgrade’s take. Sean Alexander’s take.

Waiting