Yvonne takes a number of video clips with her Canon IXY 200F. They're nothing special, and only 640×480, so I was interested when this week's ALDI specials included a 12 Mega Pixel High Definition Video Camera for only $70. The great thing about ALDI is that I can return things if I don't like them, so I got Yvonne to pick one up.
ALDI's technology things are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are good, some are not so good. Some are quite bad. But nothing comes close to the uselessness of this device. The lens looks as if it has a cover which closes when not in use, but it doesn't. And it doesn't have a lens cap. There's no way to protect it. Inserting the battery and SD card was made much more difficult by lack of instructions about which way round to insert it, and the cover is really difficult to close.
But what about the image quality? Terrible! Here are some rough comparisons of still photo quality from the Bauhn, the Canon, and my Olympus E-30 in that sequence:
The highlights (trees in the background) are burnt out, the shadows are too dark, and there's extreme unsharpness and distortion in the corners. Here the top left corner of the same photos:
Clearly the Canon can't compete with the Olympus, but the Bauhn is an order of magnitude worse still.
But that's nothing! The thing doesn't have a flash, of course, but its light sensitivity is completely unacceptable. Here photos taken inside:
There should be no difficulty getting correct exposure for a still shot: just leave the shutter open longer (the Olympus shot was 1 second, hand-held, and still recognizable), while the Canon jacked up the sensitivity to 800/30° ISO.
Still, this is supposed to be a video camera. The camera function is relatively unimportant: what are the videos like? Tried the same scenes in video, this time without the Olympus (which doesn't do video). The first problem was getting them in a format that I could display. I couldn't download the images via USB:
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da1: < General > Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da1: 40.000MB/s transfers
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da1: 121MB (247808 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 121C)
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da2 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus8 target 0 lun 1
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da2: < General > Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da2: 40.000MB/s transfers
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: da2: 968MB (1982464 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 968C)
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: GEOM_PART: integrity check failed (da1, MBR)
Aug 23 10:22:28 eureka kernel: GEOM_PART: integrity check failed (da2, MBR)
So I took out the SD card and read it directly. And then I couldn't display it with mplayer with either the vdpau or xv output drivers. With vdpau I get:
[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_video_surface_put_bits_y_cb_cr: An invalid pointer was provided.
A: 0.7 V: 0.7 A-V: 0.003 ct: 0.002 21/ 21 31% 5% 0.7% 0 0
The corresponding video display is alternately acceptable and completely broken, maybe every alternate frame. xv gives the same swscaler message along with a broken display:
Finally got it to display with x11, in the process discovering that the image format is only 1280×720. Why? Clearly it has a 12 MP sensor.
Uploading to YouTube worked, but I got a strange message:
What is there to fix? This appears to be another YouTube markup problem. At one point I found a fleeting message that disappeared again:
We detected that your video may have bad lighting. Would you like us to fix that?
Yes, I would like. Unfortunately, YouTube also has difficulties with the images. Here (finally) is the outside:
The green banding that appears when playing the video appear to be YouTube's attempt to recover the broken image. They're even more obvious in the inside, where the image is really just about completely black:
There's more. The camera writes invalid EXIF data to its still images:
Date taken: Sunday, 2 January 2011, 5:07:55
Exposure: 3 sec, f/2.8 (EV 1.4), 200/24 ISO
Flash: Fired, Return detected
Camera: ICATCHTEK 559SMBAUHN
The shutter speed and aperture appear to be invariant, and of course there's no flash. I set the date when I got it, but it forgot it at some point. There is no flash, so that's incorrect. And the exposure is always given as the same.
All in all, then, an amazingly bad camera. Why did they ever try to put it on the market? But, in passing, it tends to confirm my comments on the quality of commercial software as compared to free software.