Sony PM5 Bloggie HD video camera
Sony’s PM5 Bloggie HD video camera was unveiled at CES 2010 in Las Vegas. They’re Sony’s answer to Cisco’s popular Flip, and they could have been just another pocket video camera. Instead the Bloggie is innovative and interesting, and together with Sony’s desktop software suite, it’s doing something very different with video.
At first glance the Bloggie looks very like a Flip. Designed to fit in a pocket, it’s small and compact, with a lens that rotates 270 degrees. Point the camera lens one way, and it’s a standard video camera, recording 720P HD video and taking 5MP still images. Rotate it the other, and you can film yourself while still seeing what’s being captured. That’s why Sony calls it the Bloggie, suggesting that video bloggers can use it to record themselves before using the built-in software to upload videos to the Internet.
The real innovation comes if you’ve bought the optional 360 degree lens adapter. All you need to do is swivel the camera so it’s vertical, and connect the adapter to the lens. The result is a recording of everything that happens around the camera – in a distorted fisheye view. You can see what’s going on, but it’s hard to parse the images. That’s where Sony’s software comes in. It unpacks the 360 degree view, turning it into a long, thin, undistorted panoramic video.
Tourists will love it, but there’s an unexpected business benefit: the ability to use one camera to record an entire meeting. All you need to do is set up the 360 degree viewer, and place a Bloggie on a tripod in the centre of the table. Once the meeting is over, convert the image into a panoramic view, and you’ve got a video record of the meeting. There’s no camera shake and no missed interactions – everything around the camera will have been recorded.
This isn’t the 360 degree video conferencing of devices like Microsoft’s RoundTable, but it’s an easy way of recording meetings for a wider audience, and for sharing ad-hoc sessions with remote workers and other members of a project team. The Bloggie produces MP4 videos, so they can be viewed on most PCs, using the built in codecs. A built-in USB connector makes it easy to upload videos from the camera to the PC, and a memory card slot means you can add additional storage for longer movies.
Sony may not replace the Flip with the Bloggie, but it’s produced a worthy competitor with features that make it a surprisingly useful business tool. At $169.99 for the base camera and $189.99 for a camera with the additional 360 degree kit, it’s also affordable.
Simon Bisson