Hasta La Gadget!

Digital cameras do more stuff than ever—detect smiles, track specific people, shoot HD video—but while some are adding dials and buttons to manage feature bloat, others are shedding buttons like dead, obsolete skin.

Here’s a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm. User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they’re increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).

The better ones tend to use a list or grid style, where everything is clearly laid out and easy to access, and more UIs seem to be trending toward the branching list model—when you highlight something, you can see its parameters underneath it. Fonts are rough on some but clearly polished on others. This is a make-or-break issue, since quick visibility is key when you shift from a button UI, or a visual one that only relies on icons.

Canon actually now has two sets of user interfaces: The old one you’re used to if you’ve used Canon lately, and a totally new one that they’re rolling out on two of their new cameras. It’s slicker, with pop out animations and a more modern font, but I think a bit more confusing since it doesn’t show you everything at once. It uses a list style for displaying settings. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s a solid UI.

Nikon has a few different UIs, but the style isn’t even consistent within one camera. Oddly, its touchscreen camera shares its ugly UI with some of their other cameras, with few, if any tweaks to make it touch-friendly. It’s only Nikon’s second-gen touch camera, but its meh UI stands in contrast to the pretty capable one on their DSLRs.

Sony, too, uses the same UI on their touchscreens as they do on their non-touchscreen cameras. It works about as well in touch as it does on non-touch cameras—which is better than Nikon’s I feel, since it uses a cross bar type of GUI that Sony’s good at. Maybe slightly bigger buttons would help. Overall, Sony’s is one of the nicer camera UIs—not terribly confusing.

Too much stuff happens on the back of their cameras, but Panasonic’s touch UI seems ‘specially designed for fingers, with big, finger-friendly options. (I didn’t notice it on their other cams, so I think it was just for the touch FX580, but I could be wrong.) Their standard non-touch UI isn’t too bad—I’d put it in the middle of the pack.

Olympus goes with a unique icon style, but it’s pretty confusing in terms of trying to get to stuff quickly or navigate backwards and forwards, since you don’t know what becomes before or after something in the hierarchy, conceptually speaking. That said, it looks better than the messy menu on the back of their latest DSLR.

Casio has the worst UI out of any camera I checked out. It’s cluttered, tiny, ugly and every other sin in the book.

Basic, boring, not particularly helpful.

I mentioned how much I liked Samsung’s list UI on the TL320 earlier. It’s straightforward, easy to navigate and looks pretty good. When you highlight something, its sub-settings pop up as a list on the right, so you know what you’ll be adjusting when you drill down a level. Their other UI isn’t quite as good, but it’s also fairly straightforward, if slightly more cluttered.

Here are all the touch UIs together. You’d think Panasonic’s was the best, except it’s wildly inconsistent about when you can touch a menu item and when you can’t. So Sony wins by a nose. Weird, Sony winning a UI battle, I know. Nikon’s touch interface is just too grotesque to be considered.

Camera UIs can definitely get better, and really need to, because it’s clear that the feature-bloat train isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. But it’s a tricky balance: How do you simplify a user interface for quick, easy access to functions while containing the smorgasbord of new features crammed into every generation of cameras? Can you even make a truly usable touch camera? Uneasy questions without easy answers.

PMA is an annual show where we get to see tomorrow’s digital cameras—the ones that’ll be populating pockets and purses for the rest of the year.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1, which the company is showing off on the floor of this year’s PMA, is the first D-SLR competitor that can auto-focus on command while recording HD video (up to 1920-by-1080 at 24 frames per second). The GH1 is an update to the Lumix DMC-G1; both caneras produce D-SLR-quality images, but are not by definition “D-SLRs,” because they do not contain mirror boxes, and thus are genreally smaller overall.

Watch our video to see the camera refocusing on the fly. .

We’re still picking up our jaws (and eyeballs) off the floor at Panasonic’s announcement of the many wonders the new Lumix DMC-GH1 has in store for us, but some lucky folks out there on the internet have actually handled the new camera and have a few impressions up for us poor GH1-less souls. The camera has an easy-access video button, to let people record right away without the voodoo associated with recording like on the D90. Panasonic samples the stereo mic at 46Khz for audio recording and along with the Wind Cut function the GH1 gathers what Lets Go Digital calls “impressive” results. Panasonic’s iA functionality for automatic scene detection and face recognition is much improved in this camera, and the new VENUS Engine HD processor (one of two processors in the camera) apparently improves noise on ISO 1600 shots. The camera also has a new sensor which allow sit to shoot in multiple aspect ratios, with a total of 14 megapixels to play with, though the camera is still rated at 12.1 megapixels. We’re looking forward to a review, but things already sound very promising!

Read – DMC-GH1 at Lets Go Digital
Read – DMC-GH1 at Digital Photography Review

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Panasonic’s HD wonder Lumix DMC-GH1 gets previewed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look, we don’t really “get” people who aren’t willing to buy the latest and greatest thing regardless of the price and / or current economic state, but evidently there’s a rather large sector still clinging to their antiquated DVD format. Blu-ray proponents Panasonic, Philips, and Sony are looking to change all that by knocking down the tab a few notches. The trio has revealed plans to form a single licensing firm for Blu-ray, which they anticipate will lower the cost of the license — and therefore the retail price — by “at least” 40 percent. They expect it’ll amount to $9.50 for read-only BD player, $14 for a burner, 11 cents for read-only discs, 12 cents for BD-Rs, and 15 cents for BD-RE rewritable discs. In its current form, hopeful BD makers have to seek out each company individually. The group also hopes a single licensing entity will help them spot unauthorized BD devices, so watch out, suspicious mom and pop Blu-ray stores.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Cheaper Blu-ray? Sony, Panasonic, and Philips say it’s coming, honestly originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff / companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got a Panasonic ES810-3s Pro-Curve Wet/Dry rechargeable razor (admit it: you really need a shave)! Read the rules below (no skimming — we’re omniscient and can tell when you’ve skimmed) and get commenting!

Special thanks to Panasonic for providing the gear!

The rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for “fixing” the world economy, that’d be sweet too.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one Panasonic ES8103s. Approximate retail value is $129.
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
• Entries can be submitted until Wednesday, February 25th, 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Announcements

Engadget’s recession antidote: win a Panasonic ES8103s Pro-Curve Wet/Dry razor! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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