Random Thoughts

David Pogue’s blog on the NY Times site is one of my favorites.  (Pogue is author of several of theMissing Manual books such as my favorite Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual.)

The other day he published his gaget list for 2008.  Several of his choices match mine.  For the entire list go here.  We match (or are close) on D-SLR, Camcorder and DVR.  See the details after the jump.

Camera: When the picture counts, the Nikon D80.  I’ve had mine for 20 months.  I can’t explain the feeling of holding an SLR in my hands again after so many years of point and shoot film and digital cameras.

DVR:  Tivo!  Agreed 100%.  Our Series 2 Tivo died while under an extended warranty last year.  It was replaced with a TiVo Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder.  Tivo was kind to transfer my lifetime service to the new unit.  I noticed that these units with the service plans were going for $750 on eBay so I thought maybe it was time to switch to the cable company DVR.  Before listing the unit on eBay, we gave the DVR a 30 trial and found we really missed the Tivo.  Plus, I love the ability to send my networked Tivo an email to record a show when I’m not home.  I purchased several old Series 2 Toshiba Tivos off eBay for about $100 each.  They have free basic Tivo so we have most of the Tivo functionality.  Now every TV in the house has a Tivo.  I hope they still work after the switch to digital TV.  If not, we certainly got our money’s worth!

Camcorder: David uses a Canon VIXIA HV30.  Mine is the Canon HG10 AVCHD High Definition Camcorder with Optical Image Stabilizer which I love.  He mentions two drawbacks to my hard-disk based camcorder:  Compression of file size which can impact quality and lack of off-line storage options since everything must eventually be moved off the camera.  On the first point, I think the picture quality is outstanding.  On the second point, I love the convience of moving specific scenes from the camera to the computer.  However, I am begining to feel the pain of filling up my computer hard disks.  It would be nice to be able to file (preferably off-site) original video tapes.  Before I switched to Mac, my Dell could not keep up during capture from a digital camcorder.  I was so frustrated that when it came time to buy a new camera, I never thought twice about the hard disk version.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.