Sketching on the PSP (or teaching an old dog new tricks)

One of the advantages of giving technology to learners is more often then not they will teach you what it can do.

We have been using PSPs (with the camera attachment) with a group of 14 year old learners. This is part of our MoLeNET project.

They have been using them to create stuff.

One of them today told their tutor about the effects option (something I had certainly missed) and the tutor told me.

One of the nice effects is the Sketch effect.

Now from a photography purist perspective you should really shoot in full colour and then use filters for this kind of effect.

Well that’s all nice and dandy if you have the computers (and software) to do this, but sometimes you don’t and come on let’s be honest a 1.3MP camera (which is what you have on top of the PSP) is certainly not a high end camera.

It’s actually quite an effective effect and much better than other sketch type effects or filters I have used.

Alas you can’t capture video with a sketch effect (though I am thinking if I can using a Pinnacle device we have.

Need to write a guide.

Eye-Fi

An interesting product was voted best of show at CES this week, a wireless SD card for your digital camera.

The card allows you to upload photographs direct from your camera to a photo sharing site on the interent via your wireless network (or a wi-fi hotspot).

I have been using a similar function (via shozu) with my cameraphone, but Eye-Fi allows you to use any camera which uses a SD card slot.

Very clever, though not yet available in the UK or so I believe.

Amazing how much cheaper things have become…

Just under four years ago (November 2003) someone on the ILT Champion mailing list asked about getting a “cheap” high end digital camera for printing images at A2 size.

I posted the following reply.

To be honest in order to get anything decent to scale up to A2 then you are going to need a minimum of 3000×2000 pixels (preferably higher than that) which means a 6MP digicam which will be at a minimum £1000, probably nearer £3000 to get something decent..

There is an easier way and you will get a much better quality image as well. As the need is for marketing purposes, the instantability (sp?) of a digital camera is not needed. I would use a normal SLR film camera (£300) and when it’s developed get it scanned onto CD. My local camera shop will put a whole 35mm film onto a CD scanning in at 3000×2000 pixels for just £10.00.

You don’t even need a SLR, as even those 35mm throwaway cameras can give you a better quality image than a 6MP camera. You could do what is needed for less than £20!

You could get an even larger number of megapixels by using a dedicated flatbed scanner.

Digital cameras are great and have their place, however for your needs I think that you will be better off with a film camera and get it scanned onto cd when you have it developed.

It’s incredible how much has changed in the last four years…

I now have a 7.2MP camera, a Sony W35, which costs just over £100!

It also has a decent Carl Zeiss lense and a lithium ion battery (so a charge will last all week).

The price of digital cameras has really come down in price. Look at all these 7MP cameras available from Amazon which show how cheap they have become.

Today you need to be less concerned about mega-pixels and be more concerned about the quality of the lense, the life of the battery, how quickly the camera starts up and how quick it is to take photographs.