Sony’s ‘Hybrid’ Still/Video Camera

September 12, 2004: Sony’s just-announced Cyber-shot DSC-M1 camera features a 5.1-megapixel CCD sensor and 3x optical zoom lens and boasts the ability to record MPEG4 movie clips with sound and VGA resolution with 30 frames/second until the memory card is full.

The M1 has a flip-out, rotating 2.5-inch ‘hybrid’ LCD monitor that claims to be usable in bright outdoor lighting and a novel body design that allows it to be used vertically for taking pictures (as shown) and ‘closed’ for reviewing shots. Separate ‘hot’ buttons provide quick access to the stills and movie recording modes and users can toggle between them at will. When the LCD is facing outward, but flush with the camera’s body, the buttons can be used to playback stills and video, turning the camera into a personal media viewer.
The Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar zoom lens covers a focal length range equivalent to 38-114 mm in 35mm format and the zoom is usable for both stills and video capture. Image data is recorded on a Memory Stick Duo card (a 32 MB card is supplied with the camera). A new hybrid recording mode automatically captures five seconds of QVGA video before and three seconds after a still image is snapped, giving users a ‘context’ for the photograph. The video and still images are stored as two separate files, but played back as one in the camera. The new MPEGMovie 4TV compression format significantly increases picture quality and resolution while dramatically reducing file size. Its reduced bit rate of 2.5 Mbps (from 11Mbps) supports recording of up to 27 minutes of VGA-resolution, 30-fps video with stereo sound on an optional 512 MB Memory Stick PRO Duo media card.

Sony’s Real Imaging Processor gives the M1 a fast start-up and rapid shot-to-shot times as well as increasing the speed of features such as auto-exposure, auto-white balance and five-area, multi-point auto-focus. The DSC-M1 uses the same InfoLithium NP-FT1 battery as the DSC-T1 and displays the remaining battery life on the LCD. It comes with a dedicated Cyber-shot Station USB battery charging cradle, which connects the camera to a PC for easy downloading or to a TV set for playing back videos and stills on the big screen. Bundled software includes PicturePackage 1.2, which allows MPEG-4 video clips to be converted into AVI format for easy editing. The camera will be shipped worldwide in December and details will be posted on the Sony websites prior to release.