Sony's Voice Recording Camera

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9507.html' target='_blank'>http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9507.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Voice recorders are VERY popular in Japan. Proof of this statement is that in Japanese electronics store, the voice recorder section is usually almost as big as the MP3 player section. So with this kind of competition, how can you stand out from the crowd and sell more? A team at Sony asked themselves that questions, and this is what they came up with: the voice recorder that can also take pictures... not bad! So this must be the first "Voicecamera" in a way. The ICD-CX50 will be on sale for less than 380 EUR in Japan from tomorrow onwards and takes pictures at a 1.3MP resolution (640x480 or 1280x960). It has 256Mb of memory (also the first digital cam with that amount of memory as far as we know). The dimensions of this combo are 45.8x101.2x23.5mm and it weighs 99g."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/image002.jpg" /> <br /><br />Never been much for using a voice recorder, but based on the article, there is clearly a market in Japan. Of course, I don't see the point of the camera. I am assuming most of the market to buy one of these would probably have a mobile phone which probably has a camera in it anyway.

[Kursplat]

Actually, I would not go so far as to say it is the first voicecamera. My 3MP Minolta Dimage Xt digital camera has a menu option for the Movie setting to record audio only. If I remember correctly, it has microphones on both the front and back of the camera and does a decent job recording a conversation between two people when placed on the table between them.

Since I have a 1GB SD card in it, I can record over 4 hours of audio with it.

All this and its a tiny camera that lives in my pocket.

The main difference is a voice recorder with a camera as opposed to a camera with a voice recorder.

[Gordo]

I recently purchased an OLYMPUS W-10 Digital Recorder on eBay, directly from Olympus. I plan on using it at meetings, and taking pictures of white boards and flip charts. While you take the photo you can record a voice over. The software links the recording to the picture. The only draw back is the low quality of the image, but it will be good enough for my purposes.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&amp;category=48688&amp;item=5767744475