Great camera but why is the digital zoom so poor?

Bought a Pentax Optio W10 at the weekend for £149. On the whole I'm over the moon about this camera. I didn't buy it for the still-taking abilities. I didn't actually buy it for taking stills at all. I bought it first and foremost as a video camera in a compact package. With that in mind my number one reason for buying this model was that it is waterproof. Thanks go to CD for getting me thinking about cameras and reasons for buying and to John for doing all the research.

I wanted to know what sort of compression the video mode uses, and it turns out it employs good old Motion JPEG. This is excellent news for editing as, if my memory of back-in-the-day home movie making goes, this is an intra-frame compression and with its lack of key-frames, is well suited to most editing packages as well as inherent frame quality.
Use of MJPEG would also account for the larger file sizes and the reported mere 29 minutes available on a 2GB SD card. The 30fps 640x480 recordings are exactly what I was after.

The bad news is the appalling noise levels being picked up by the microphone from the optical zoom and auto focussing. Dreadful!

The other disappointment is the digital zoom. While I would never consider using this on a still photo, I expected good results from video. With a 6 Mega-pixel sensor, and VGA video only using some 300K pixels why do we still get pixelated digital zoom? By my calculations it should be possible to have a fair level of digital zoom before any pixelation sets in. I imagine this applies to all cameras - my only guess is the processing involved in discarding pixels to work, but surely that's as easy as scaling pixels which is what it's doing now. Someone tell me, I'd like to know.

So while I have no complaints over the water-resisting-videoing abilities of this cam, I find myself unable to use either the optical zoom (ruins sound) or the digital zoom (ruins image).

However since the main useage will be in noisy environments, it's not too much of a problem, and besides, it records quality video in a tiny package. - Q.E.F.

Staying one step ahead

I see that there are plans afoot to record audio and video of passengers on planes in the future (including monitoring in the toilet!) in a quest to create a hijack proof aeroplane. Nice idea but in a system designed to spot unnatural behavious, doesn't this kind of surveillance simply lead to unnatural behaviour? I can already spot ways around this with the vast array of technology and gadgets available today. A blanket jamming/interception of any wireless signals (bluetooth, IR etc) would surely be required too? Surely extrapalating the trends of security leads to everyone being monitored all the time. Which I think is kinda bad.

Le Bon Moment

Technology is a wonderful thing when applied correctly. It won't be long before the whole Skype video web-call scenario expands to fully mobile situations and then it's only a small(ish) step to teleports.

Beyond the thrill of seeing the pazzers from my hotel in Quebec, the still-novelty value of video-calls was good fun. Reminded me of a slightly extreme version of testing out a new pair of walkie-talkies:

Me: "Can you hear me still?"
Pazzer: "yes, can you see the pond?"
Me: "yes, I'm walking to the end of the drive now, can you hear me still?"
Pazzer: "still good, I'm in the lounge now"
Me: "I can see it...I'm down the road now, can you see the pub?"
Pazzer: "Yes, nice and clear"
Me: "ok I'm across the Atlantic and in Montreal, can see you perfectly..."