Best video phone for dance clips?

[Patrick]

I don't think this too geeky a subject for this thread?

I'm getting embarassed/disappointed when workshop teachers say "please video the routine to help you remember the moves", and my ancient (ie >1year) mobile has no video. :sad:

I wish I'd been videoing that time the teacher was demonstrating how to do a drop safely, and dropped her! (luckily stage was bouncy) Of course that was how not to do it... :wink:

So I want to record some of these precious moments for posterity on my mobile. And also have it play MP3, take good pictures, backup everything easily to PC, walk dog, make tea etc. And possibly keep in my pocket while dancing without fear of injury to me, partner or phone. Not necessarily in that order. By coincidence, I drowned my current mobile in the sea yesterday...

One local shop says Samsung D900 is the bees knees. Another says "rubbish, what you need is the Sony Ericsson K800i".The new Nokia N93 looks great on paper, but is very big. Not seen it in real life yet.

Mmmm, that Samsung feels sooo good in my hand... OK, getting too geeky now :blush:

Any recommendations? Phone shop opens in 30 mins!

Patrick :flower: :flower: :flower:

[Zebra Woman]

I don't think this too geeky a subject for this thread?

I'm getting embarassed/disappointed when workshop teachers say "please video the routine to help you remember the moves", and my ancient (ie >1year) mobile has no video. :sad:

I wish I'd been videoing that time the teacher was demonstrating how to do a drop safely, and dropped her! (luckily stage was bouncy) Of course that was how not to do it... :wink:

So I want to record some of these precious moments for posterity on my mobile. And also have it play MP3, take good pictures, backup everything easily to PC, walk dog, make tea etc. And possibly keep in my pocket while dancing without fear of injury to me, partner or phone. Not necessarily in that order. By coincidence, I drowned my current mobile in the sea yesterday...

Oh dear. Sadly non of them are waterproof. I washed mine at 40 degrees a couple of months ago.



One local shop says Samsung D900 is the bees knees. Another says "rubbish, what you need is the Sony Ericsson K800i".The new Nokia N93 looks great on paper, but is very big. Not seen it in real life yet.

Mmmm, that Samsung feels sooo good in my hand... OK, getting too geeky now :blush:

Any recommendations? Phone shop opens in 30 mins!

Patrick :flower: :flower: :flower:


Hello Patrick :flower:

I have the SonyEricsson 800i. It takes good video in daylight or artificial light, but it struggles at dark dance venues. It has a very strong light and night mode which both help but at the end of the day it's not a video camera . I have upgraded the memory card to 1Gb so I now have about 200 songs 50 pictures and can hold at least half an hour of video too. I like the way you can have contact ringtones. Each contact on my phone has their own song as the ring tone. I have had hours of amusement allocating songs to friends, plus when the phone rings I know straight away who it is.

The Sony has a hands free walkman headset for listening to music and talking on the phone. It is fab for music but I have had complaints about the handsfree from people I have talked to on my phone. Apparently the microphone is dreadful, it seems to pick up every noise in my car more than my voice. :sick:

The other snag with the sony is as it's not a flip phone you have to keep locking the keyboard to stop it making calls.

Good luck

Alison

[Lory]

Sony Ericsson K800i".

This phone came out as the top phone on The Gadget Show, see HERE (http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/5gsmain.jsp?lnk=501&featureid=186&description=3G%20Phones)

I love that programme! :waycool: The silver haired guy on it, reminds me of SF, from a distance :na:

[ducasi]

Rather than compromise with a video camera on my phone, I went for a proper video camera.

So I got a Sanyo Xacti VPC-C5. It records onto SD cards, in MP4 format. I believe it to be compatible with the iPods capable of playing video (I don't have one, so can't say for sure.)

It has a fantastic zoom, and some nice features like image stabilisation. Oh, it also has a tripod mount, making it useful if you want to video yourself. It's not great in the dark though.

Oh, and it's also a 5MP digital camera – again, much better than you're going to get on a phone.

There's now also the "C6" model, which does 6MP photos but is otherwise much the same...

[Patrick]

Oh dear. Sadly non of them are waterproof. I washed mine at 40 degrees a couple of months ago.

I like the way you can have contact ringtones. Each contact on my phone has their own song as the ring tone. I have had hours of amusement allocating songs to friends, plus when the phone rings I know straight away who it is.

The other snag with the sony is as it's not a flip phone you have to keep locking the keyboard to stop it making calls.

Good luck

Alison

Thanks Alison. I'd love to be able to do the contact ringtone thing! (Did you know that all Ladies have a song named after them? It's the law I think. But hardly any men do....) But I now have no contacts! All lost in the sea. I feel so cut off... :tears: :tears: :tears: :tears:

I know there were at least 2 very important texts pending when phone finally died :mad: Trying to make arrangements for weekend with people I can only contact by mobile, who's phone numbers are only in my mobile...

Off to phone shop to try to resurrect something from dead phone. Will try to resist their sales patter a little longer awaiting further advice! ("I only have one Samsung D900 sir, it will be gone today, don't know when we'll get another...")

I hate that keyboard locking thing too. Now the Samsung is a slidy-uppy phone...

Patrick

Alison, my aim is true...

[Patrick]

Rather than compromise with a video camera on my phone, I went for a proper video camera.



Can anyone point me to some video clips showing what a good mobile phone can do, vs a real video camera?

Have been seduced into taking a Samsung D900 on trial. It is lovely. First time I have fallen in love with a phone (usually a hate-hate relationship).

But.... the video quality is not what I expected, sure I've seen better on other mobiles. Low light quality is indeed naff, but even in good light at max resolution, the picture is not all that clear and seems very jerky. Low frame rate? The user guide is not much help, doesn't even give any technical specs.

On the plus side, I did manage to record (most) of the routines at the Latin workshop I went to yesterday. Finger trouble...

Patrick :confused:

[ducasi]

From what I can find, the Samsung D900 does "CIF resolution" video, which is 352 x 288 – I'm not sure if it does 15 or 30 frames per second, though the clips I saw were at 17.3 frames per second. :confused:

In contrast my Sanyo C5 video camera does 640x480 at 30 frames per second.

Here's a sample (http://kenyattacheese.net/media/review_xactic5/xactiC5_movement640.mov) of what the Sanyo video camera can do...

The Nokia N93 matches my camera in resolution and frame rate, though in some ways it's really a camera with a phone feature, rather than a phone with a camera feature... ;)

Mobile Review (http://www.mobile-review.com/) has sample videos from the Nokia, the Samsung, and I guess the SE K800i, though I didn't dig that far...