The Poor Man’s Steadicam

SteadycamMy pal Jamie suggested I try the Poor Man’s Steadicam to bring a little stability to my video.

“The camera operator may walk (or even jog), move through tight hallways and doorways, and even climb up and down stairs without shaking the camera. Unfortunately, professional steadycams cost around $1500. Even the cheap 3rd party ones cost $600+. Not exactly a bargain considering many of us use cameras in that price range. So, I decided to make my own version. It turns out, it only costs $14. Not too bad.”

 

Casio Exilim EX-Z1000

My beloved Casio camera started giving me some weird white screens and rather than wait for it to completely fail at a critical moment… I upgraded. The Casio Exilim Ex-Z1000 is the new, bigger brother to the model I had. Slightly larger form factor but that allows for an even larger display. Lots of megapixels and some optical zoom. But the real clincher for me was the video. With a 2 gig SD card, I can record up to two hours of video! Amazing. Sound is pretty good, too. Here’s a little 2 min clip (13 meg .wmv) I shot last night. John Fougere and David Brazeal doing the weekly high school football scoreboard show.

Archos PMA430

“The new Archos PMA430 is a 30GB multimedia player (music, photos, videos), an audio and video recorder, a PDA, a wireless Web browser, and a game machine. In fact, it’s everything but a cell phone and camera. At $750 street, the PMA430 costs as much as a notebook computer. But it does just about everything you’d want a multimedia computer to do, and you can slip it into a jacket pocket.”

–PC Magazine review