Not so long ago, Sony took its original Bloggie pocket video camera and placed a 270 degrees swivel lens at the top that was said to cater for those spontaneous moments. Now the next generation of Bloggie has been revealed and the swivel lens has gone. In its place is a fixed F2.8 wide angle, auto-focus lens with 4x digital zoom. The new MHS-TS20 and MHS-TS10 Bloggie Touch pocket camcorders have a 3-inch touchscreen display, can shoot up to full 1080p high definition video and are capable of snapping 12.8 megapixel still images.
The latest Bloggie pocket-friendly video cameras sport a fairly minimalist design with one side being dominated by a 3-inch (76.2mm), 288,000 dot resolution capacitive touchscreen display and the other showing just the F2.8 Sony lens. Below the display – which benefits from automatic orientation and where all framing, viewing and feature selection takes place – sits a dedicated record button.
The device allows simultaneous capture of video and still images and content can be tagged for subsequent sharing later on. There are power and camera buttons to one side and a mini HDMI-out port to the other, and the bottom end features a pop-out USB arm.
The 2.04 x 4.21 x 0.59-inch (52 x 107 x 15.2mm) pocket cam comes with either 4GB or 8GB of internal storage, an Exmoor CMOS sensor with sensitivity ranging from ISO80 to ISO1600, SteadyShot image stabilization and is pre-installed with Bloggie software, which caters for editing and organizing of content prior to upload to social networking sites like YouTube and FaceBook. The software can also link up to Sony's own Personal Space service which sends out email viewing invitations to contacts specified by the user.
The 8GB MHS-TS20 is available now for pre-order with delivery starting in October, and is priced at US$199.99. The 4GB MHS-TS10 shares the same pre-order and delivery status and is priced at US$179.99
