Welcome to a Digital Camera Battery specialist of the Camcorder Battery
With the Bloggie Live, Sony has launched the world’s first Wi-Fi pocket camcorder. We took it for a spin and came back with a mostly favorable impression. This Bloggie, which costs $250, is a fine first effort in the new world of wireless pocket camcorders.
Point-and-shoot camcorders are all about convenience, and Wi-Fi promises exactly that, letting you throw your videos and photos online without fussing with USB cables, SD memory cards, or a computer.
In large part, the Bloggie Live MHS-TS55 delivers on this promise. This elegant and durable little model, wrapped in a nicely contoured matte silver case, lets you upload images wirelessly to your computer, smartphone, social network site, and even to the cloud, where you can store and retrieve images from anywhere you can hook into Wi-Fi.
Testing the Wi-Fi tools
Wi-Fi newbies will spend a lot of time fiddling around with this Bloggie's with battery such as sony NP-F550 battery
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menus and settings to get the various Wi-Fi applications to work. However, once you get past the learning curve, this camcorder is generally easy to use, and works as advertised.
I tested this Bloggie Live’s Wi-Fi tools at several of my local haunts—a Barnes and Noble store, a Peet’s café, and the Apple Store in Berkeley. I also checked it out at a couple of Starbucks cafés, and with two popular smartphones—an iPhone 4S using the Verizon Wireless network and an Android model, the Samsung Galaxy S II, using T-Mobile’s service.
Public Wi-Fi is still a bit wild and woolly. Different access point outlets have different ways to log on to their networks, and it’s not uncommon for a file upload to fail mid-stream. On the other hand, I was often able to upload my Bloggie files at a brisk clip over Wi-Fi. I posted a 13-minute Full HD video file (905MB) to Facebook in as little as seven minutes—10 times faster than doing the same upload from my home computer using a Comcast Xfinity cable internet connection.
Many factors impact Wi-Fi performance, including walls and other obstacles that can impede signals, and the density of other wireless traffic in the area. I tested the Bloggie Live in a low-rise suburban area with steady but relatively light Wi-Fi traffic, which likely contributed to my overall smooth experience. Some urbanites may experience more difficulties.
Posting images
I tested three of this camcorder’s four Wi-Fi-based tools: Post and Share (posting images directly to social networking sites); View on Smartphone (copying images directly to a smartphone); and Live Streaming (sending video to family, friends, and colleagues in real-time while shooting). Sony touts its PlayMemories Online cloud service, designed to let you store and retrieve your images from anywhere with Wi-Fi access, but the service was not yet available.
Post and Share is the killer app. It let me upload files very quickly to Facebook and YouTube, and is a great option if you want to quickly slap videos and photos up onto the net with little or no accompanying text. You can add only a brief video title, and even that can take awhile using the camcorder’s cumbersome onscreen keyboard. Once uploaded, you can’t make edits. If you want to change something—such as add a comment or delete an image—you have to work through a device with a browser like your computer or smartphone. As for copying images directly to the smartphones, I had to download Sony’s free PlayMemories Mobile app for both the iPhone 4S and the Android phone. Once I got it going, the apps were very easy to use.
Live Streaming is a very cool concept: It lets you turn the Bloggie Live into your own personal video broadcasting system. For example, you can start capturing video of your son’s birthday party, and stream it real-time to family across the country, where they can view it in their browser. In reality, the Live Streaming setup took time to figure out and it didn’t always work smoothly. I had to sign up for a live-streaming service (in this case, qik.com), and sign into the same account from both the camcorder and the smartphone at the same time to get Live Streaming to work.
The manual didn’t spell out how to use the online service to do this. When I finally got it going, the video streaming worked well so long as I didn’t move the camcorder much. When I started panning quickly, the streamed video on the smartphone started looking a little jerky.
The battery performed well during the Wi-Fi sessions. During one nearly three-hour shoot, I uploaded 9GB of clips—an hour and 45 minutes of Full HD video—and still had juice to spare. In a standard continuous-record run-down test, it lasted two hours and five minutes, about average for camcorders in this class. You get the usual drawbacks, too. The battery is built-in so you need to send the camcorder to a Sony dealer to replace it. Also, as is the case with most pocket camcorders, recharging takes a long time. It took me three and a half hours to fully recharge off my computer’s USB port.