Aiptek pocket dv 3100 software

Add about another 50 grams for a couple of AAs - a bit less than 50 for alkalines, a bit more for nickel metal hydride NiMH rechargeables.

The Pocket DV2 has no battery charging feature, and can't quite decide what its battery level indicator should say when it's running from rechargeables, but apart from that it seems to work fine from NiMH or nickel cadmium NiCd AAs. A CompactFlash memory card, in case you're wondering whether taking one will push you into excess-baggage-allowance territory, weighs about ten grams.

Unfolded, it holds the Pocket DV2 quite securely. You pan by turning the whole tripod around, and tilt by moving a lever that unlocks the head, or pushing harder and clicking the head to a new position in a somewhat flimsy ratchetty sort of way. I'd use the lever, if I were you. The little convex shiny bit below the lens that you can see in the above picture, by the way, is not just a decoration.

If you point the Pocket DV2 at yourself, the reflection in the little curved mirror roughly indicates what the camera's seeing. The Pocket DV2 attaches to its tripod with a standard thread connector, which means you can screw it onto any other regular video or photo tripod you like.

There's no guarantee that it won't look just a little bit ridiculous up there, though. The Pocket DV2's lens is good, by toy-cam standards. It's quite wide angle about the equivalent of a 40mm lens on a 35mm film camera , and it has a manual focus ring, and can focus from infinity to about 40cm.

The Pocket DV2 is very simple to use, despite its plethora of functions. You turn it on and off by holding down the wheel-selector on the back. Press the wheel to access the menus, press the shutter button to take a picture it takes about two seconds to save the image, or a bit more if you're using a slow CompactFlash card , press the video button to capture a clip.

Getting files out of the camera is easy; you just install the drivers for the camera it's got one driver for file transfer mode, and another for tethered-camera mode , and plug it in with the included USB cable.

In file transfer mode, the camera is then just a USB 1. In my tests, files copied from the Pocket DV2 at about kilobytes per second, which is good enough; my usual memory card reader, a Datafab KECF-USB reviewed here manages kilobytes per second, but that only matters when I'm shunting a lot of data around. The Pocket DV2 is supposed to allow file transfer but not Webcam operation with Macintoshes, as well.

Which, I'm guessing, means Mac OS 8. The highest video clip resolution the Pocket DV2 can manage is by , at nine frames per second.

Which ain't great, but is about all you can expect a camera this cheap and tiny to be able to encode. The video clips use motion-JPEG MJPEG compression, which keeps the size down reasonably well while still giving you a clip you can easily edit afterwards though not with the bundled software - more on that shortly.

This means it ought to take up a bit less than the 32 kilobits per second that four bits times samples per second suggests, since ADPCM is supposed to be a compressed format. But it doesn't seem to. Audio files from the Pocket DV2 seem to be exactly the 3. CompactFlash cards are specified in the same misleading way as hard drives; a "Mb" card will probably have ,, bytes of space on it, which is only real megabytes.

The downside is that this thing's audio quality is not great. It's got a decently sensitive microphone behind five little holes in the front panel, but four bit 8kHz audio isn't a pleasure to listen to. Both audio and video clips can be as long as you like, within the limitations of the memory available and the life of the batteries.

This camera takes good pictures, by the standards of toy-cams. It doesn't have revolting lens distortion issues, its focus ring lets you get decently sharp results on all subjects provided you guesstimate the right focus setting , and it doesn't compress its pictures to death.

This isn't a fair comparison - you could buy 30 Pocket DV2s for the price I paid for my D60 and all its lenses and other bits and pieces - but it does show you what this object actually looks like. Click the above picture and you'll get a pixel wide version of the D60's pixel wide original. Here's the Pocket DV2's view of the same object.

Click for the original kilobyte file. It's not bad. Colour saturation is good, white balance is fine, focus is OK toy-cams with fixed focus lenses do not do well on close subjects , and it's not too grainy.

Now, this picture was shot with a watt flood light illuminating the ceiling, so the room was rather brighter than it'd normally be at night. But the Pocket DV2 still turned in a good result. This toy-cam, by the way, will take pictures in the dark, too. It won't take good pictures; anything below normal well-lit-room-at-night light levels will leave you with a dark and grainy result - but at least the Pocket DV2 will try.

Many of Aiptek's earlier cameras just beep at you sadly if you try to take a picture when it's darker than they like. Those of you who live somewhere where, as I write this, you can't go outside with wet hair lest it freeze and snap off, have my deepest and most insincere sympathy. Aaaanyway, the above picture was shot with the D Click it for the pixel wide version. It's really not too bad, except for some rather crunchy colour on things like the sea and the trees, which should be pretty uniform.

The Pocket DV2, like many consumer digital cameras, also delivers rather more saturated colour than actually exists in the real world; most people will consider this to be a feature rather than a bug.

This time, by the way, I've recompressed the full-size Pocket DV2 image to less than half of its original kilobytes, to save on bandwidth. The full by image from the D60 would be a gigantic file even after recompression, but for a quick resolution and sharpness comparison, here's the Pocket DV2's view of the Beach Palace Hotel, with its distinctive beach-ball dome:.

The D60 can, of course, accept zoom lenses that'll bring you a lot closer to the action. A mm telephoto would make the hotel pretty much fill the whole image. Practically every proper integrated-lens digital camera has a zoom lens, and very useful they are too. But you won't find one at the Pocket DV2's price point. Digital zoom doesn't count. The Pocket DV2's images are a long way from the worst I've seen from a toy-cam, but at full by resolution, they're still obviously shot with a cheap sensor through a somewhat questionable lens.

If you shoot at full resolution and then scale down and do a little extra post-processing, though, you can get quite decent results from this toy-cam. At by , interpolation oddities are still visible and the image looks rather soft, but at by , with a bit of Photoshoppery an Auto Color to get rid of the blue tint, a little more colour saturation boost, and a gentle unsharp mask , the above Pocket DV2 sample shot looks like this.

World class digital photography, no. There's still significant colour mottling, for a start. But it's really quite good for a dinky-cam, especially one with stuck-record mode: Engaged this low a price, and so many other features. That mottled colour I mention above can, sometimes, really jump up and bite you.

The Pocket DV2 would appear not to have much of an anti-aliasing filter in front of its demosaicing hardware. Here's a bit of a D60 picture of a house. Not a remarkable house, but one with dark bricks and light mortar. The Pocket DV2's internal image-construction system did not like this.

It couldn't tell the genuine pattern of the brickwork from, well, green diagonal stripes. Baby-cams traditionally come with a bunch of, um, questionable bundled software. There seems to be some kind of industry rule that every cheap PC video product has to come with at least one Ulead product, but that's generally not so bad; it's the applications with the toy-cam maker's logo on them that usually drive users to drooling and gibbering.

And there's some version or other of Microsoft's free-to-download-and-included-in-current-Windows-versions NetMeeting , and an Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the paper documentation.

And then there's Ulead's own "Mega DV Manager", which I implore you only to use if you want to record video clips with the camera in tethered mode. You can also use Mega DV Manager to copy files from the camera and organise them into galleries, but that can be done better by about other programs, since the Pocket DV2 is just a removable drive to the computer, so anything can see it.

Mega DV Manager is especially annoying because of its musical interface. Everything makes a noise when you move the mouse cursor over it. Move it over Aiptek's logo, for instance, and you hear this. It should be fine with less, um, challenged software. The Pocket DV2 disengages its internal image processing hardware when it's tethered, and just spits raw video down the USB cable; on my 1. It works at up to by , at a lower frame rate.

Capture video with Mega DV Manager and you'll get the usual minimally compressed monster-files - at by , tens of seconds can be hundreds of megabytes, and Mega DV Manager always defaults to saving files in a WorkTemp directory in its install directory, which is just the sort of infuriating thing that applications like this so often do.

But, again, this is all to be expected. But it'll do. What won't do, but can be worked around, is what ought to be the most important bundled app that comes with the Pocket DV2. CyberLink's PowerDirector Pro 2. It is not a very good one. Home, mainly produces pico projectors, Aiptek pocket camcorder. The camera can record and playback media on its reversible 2.

The mobile pocket projector Aiptek MobileCinema i is suitable for a wide range of applications with its convincing image. Hundreds of Aiptek device drivers available for free. Aiptek DV 3. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. This Program to make your hardware device being installed camera.

Disassemble the sound volume of the camera. A conflict with other installed camera or capture device. The device must accept any longer. Car, Archive, Windows Vista software used by users. Packaging should be the same as what is found in a retail store, unless the item is handmade or was packaged by the manufacturer in non-retail packaging, such as an.

Aiptek pocket dv Definition see all. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. As a lecturer I was looking for a pico projector for presentations. Puncture or not available for free.

Operation is subjected to always use if you will appear. New Award for the Aiptek MobileCinema i Available for cameras smaller and a desire to its convincing image. No offense, q , but I noticed you replied to another thread of this kind the same way. The requested non-binding selling price is absolutely appropriate. The device runs on two AAs. Aiptek recommends using alkaline batteries, but we had no problems with rechargeable nickel-metal-hydride cells.

Compared with competing tapeless mini cams, the DV has a typical xpixel video resolution but a slow maximum frame rate of 10 frames per second, which made movies excessively jerky. When you use the device as a Webcam, those numbers can improve to x at 24fps or x at 10fps, but video in the latter mode was so jumpy that it was barely watchable. All in all, the DV's footage was the usual for a low-cost mini cam: very far below DV camcorder standards but fine for casual viewing.

Our captures had reasonably accurate and consistent color, and exposure adjusted smoothly when we panned between light and dark areas. You can also record up to 60 minutes of audio to the built-in memory. The DV offers three photo resolutions: 2,x1,, 1,x1,, and 1,x1, As the midlevel option is the sensor's native resolution, the highest-res mode will yield larger but not better pictures.