Type of bind: Electronics
Brand: Sharp
Compatibility: PC Firewire
EAN num: 0074000352452
Label: Sharp
Manufacturer: Sharp
Model: VNEZ-1U
Publishing house: Sharp
Sale Popularity Level: 79906
Studio: Sharp
Features:- Creates Internet-ready video
- Fits in a pocket or purse
- Records up to 1 hour on 32 MB SmartMedia card (4 MB included)
- Takes still images at 640 x 480 dpi
- 4x digital zoom
Accessories:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
What's another way Sharp is improving people's lives through technology and innovation? Enter Sharp's new Internet Viewcam, the VN-EZ1U. It's the world's very first digital motion picture and sound camera designed specifically for the Internet. With it, you can capture all the sights and sounds around you and easily transfer them to your PC. From there, they are yours to share with the world through Web pages, e-mail, Internet broadcasting, corporate Intranet, or playback on your PC. And all of this can be done as fast and as easily as you can say 'Sharp!' The VN-EZ1U is the very first digital camcorder to incorporate the MPEG-4 moving picture compression standard. This means your videos take up much less space on your PC and can be sent that much faster. Because the Internet Viewcam uses Microsoft's? Advanced Streaming Format (ASF), your recordings can be viewed and heard at virtually the same time they're being downloaded. All of this by a camera literally the size of a bar of soap. Magic? No. Just another Sharp innovation!
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
I bought the VNEZ-1 when it was in market testing before 1998, and there have been no changes. Six years experience.
It's petite size is ergonomically designed to still allow a feel to the hand that speaks of something larger. It is not so tiny that it feels flimsy.
The pixel count of 350k might send some running away, but look at full screen MPEG-4 product and you'll be surprised at the high level of quality. Just remember the microphone is "on top" if you shoot video, and turn the lens to parallel the microphone. The resulting video will also pleasantly impress those skeptics.
MPEG-4 compression is the MP3 of video at present. It can be very very good with proper lighting. It's a CCD pickup for data in the lens, and too much or too little light can present skewed color. There is an aperature adjustment that allows great shots in bright sunlight. Low light sensitivity is not its strong point, but the resulting sepia movies are not unpleasant, reminding one of old movies. Another lens adjustment for closeup and distance shooting exists which does a good job. Not all vidcams can say even at their worst they're good.
This is also a STILL camera. I took this to Chicago in 2000 and shot photos of the city which I dropped into a software editing program allowing brightness, contrast and colour correction along with cropping and further compression. My nursing colleagues at the get together saw their own walking tour online that night. Fireworks in the sky. The murals, sculptures, dancing water fountains, architectural artworks and diverse myriad peoples of all kinds mingling on the streets. Panhandlers sleeping on benches, a wedding in a public square. The result was professional quality in terms of internet compatibility and ease of use for still photography.
I took this to a family get together at Thanksgiving one year. Everyone filled a plate and sat "somewhere" and chatted back and forth catching up on the year past as they gathered from all over. I sat the camera down flat on a table with the mic and lens drinking on the entire room. Literally the microphone definition is good enough to listen to the result four times with a new experience each time; a group of twelve people involved in four separate conversations and no one conversation drowning out the others ... the result is a timeless heirloom to a family with older members.
A tool in audio history and video history.
A 32 MB card with close to thirty minute video potential is a true internet compatible device. I have a dial-up internet connection with 14.4 kilobyte per second transmission speed. I live "way out in the country" and DSL is just not possible. Local offers of DSl discuss transmission speeds of 50 Megabytes per second transmission capacity, similar to many cable offers of service. Sending a half an hour of family video to someone with a half second of internet transmission time is good news to family who want to keep in touch. To family with others in the military who are hungry for news from home, or students who can't get back for that Sunday get together that so many enjoy. A half a second transmission of the event and those far away can munch power bars while in the video someone serves the chicken and mashed potatoes. No muss, no fuss, no software jungle to struggle through. Shoot it, transfer it to the computer, add an event name by changing the file name, attach it to an email and it is there ready to play in an internationally available format. This is an MPEG4 ENCODER on the fly, as the experts say. It's what it does.
Still photographs are in the industry standard, JPEG.
I have yet to discover equipment failure. Everything gets old and I expect to need to take it for repair some day. I am licensed as an electronics engineer and can say that this equipment gets a very very good score on my private rating in terms of durability and reliability.
I have not yet had an accidental drop test occur.
Evenings out for a walk at sunset, a great camera to have in one's pocket when suddenly the vista becomes one of breathtaking beauty no one would believe could happen in your own backyard. The rendered colour is great.
The parallel to film speed is rather slow. One cannot do stop-action still photography. Moving subjects do make blurred pictures as a still camera.
Videos do not show up as jumpy in MPEG4. Very smooth, a full 32 frames per second at least. I have seen MPEG2 cameras do less adequately at five times the price.
I grew up using 35mm Exacta and Leica and of course the Kodak brownie 120 camera. The highest award I ever won for photography was with the Brownie camera. Super effects work is just run of the mill among experts and geniuses, thus not always art, not aklways a winner. Super effects can also be difficult to set up with any camera. But the ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
-
Sharp VNEZ1 MPEG-4 is a great little camera until the batteries fall out when the power is on, and then when you put them back in you find your menus are in Japanese. Then you get a Japanese person to look at it to change it back to English and they tell you there is no menu option to change the language selection - which rings a bell because I never saw an option to change the language selection when it was in English!!!
Rated by buyers -
Yeah, the discription says for pc users, mac users are out of luck. Well I have a MAC, so I can break the rules! All you need to do is purchase a smartmedia flash card reader compatible with MAC and you will also have to download a free windows media player for MAC, thats it! I use a multi flash reader thats compatible wih my os9.2 . Unfortunately my reader does not work under osX.2, but, there are readers that will. I can still share my files with osX.2, or drag n drop into my Virtual PC, so whatever os I use, I can still view and send my visuals over the net!
MAC users, no need to worry, you have a MAC. And you know you cant stop THE MAC!
Rated by buyers -
This little unit looked so cool I bought it as soon as they were available in the USA. (You can't beat the size, it's about the size of a pack of cigarettes.) I've had it for about 1 1/2 years. It's come in handy on a few occasions. But the output is so low res, I find myself yearning for more dpi. I'm getting better at taking pictures with it, given its limits, and currently have one of its photos as my desktop screensaver. Even at that size (on a 19 in monitor), it looks OK. I just sent my mother 4-5 photos of her grandchildren and they uploaded (winzipped) in about one minute on an analog line. The shutter is a little slow, so there's more time then you may be used to after you click and before you see.... You know what they say, you can't have it all. With this you trade speed for quality and convenience for precision. And it just gives me another excuse to buy another piece of equipment.
Rated by buyers 
-
This little viewcam stopped working right after the warranty. I did like playing with it while it worked. But when I tried to get it fixed, the cost was more than what I had paid for the camera. Sharp USA refused to do anything about it.
Find other books like this one:
