Tag Archive for 'sony'

21
Mar

Sony Alpha A900 DSLR gets photographed

By Taylor 0 Comments
Categories: Industry News, News and Photography

The Sony Alpha DSLR-A900 is mostly desired by Sony fanatics and Zeiss lovers, but its hard to deny the appeal of a 24MP full frame sensor.

With little details, Masterchong.com offers an “August or September” release date and basic specs. This camera is expected to compete with Nikon’s current D3 and future D3x.

It should be hitting product counters sometime after Photokina.

Sony Alpha A-900

Sony A900 pictured with optional battery grip and external flash.

Check out Masterchong for the full scoop and extra pictures.

06
Jan

Sony OLED 27” TV at CES

By Taylor 2 Comments
Categories: Industry News and News

Without a release date, this is just a piece of eye candy that we can’t touch - but what eye candy! Its 11” counterpart is ready to hit the streets for a steep $2,500. The 3mm thick TV is hardly thicker then a credit card!

Sony OLED TV

01
Jan

Sony Slim PSP (PSP-2000) Review

By Taylor 9 Comments
Categories: Guest and Reviews

PSP Slim Review
Guest Post by Neill Silva of thelulz.net.
When the PSP unveiled itself in America on March 24, 2005, ten years after the release of the original Playstation and five years after the release of the Playstation 2, it sold a smashing 200,000 units at launch, and totaled about 500,000 units at the end of the first month. It was a breakthrough in handheld gaming devices, and would soon have many hit games to put it to the top. The PSP was great at the time, but the price was quite high at $249. In 2007, the price dropped to $169 for the console, and $199 for the starter pack, making it more affordable then ever.

Slim PSP Review
(Image compliments of Wikipedia)

Hardware:
The recent limited edition Daxter Entertainment goes for only $199 and comes with the PSP Slim, the charger, a 1 GB SD Memory card, Daxter the game, and the Family Guy: Freakin’ sweet collection. I have had three PSP’s over the span from its release up until now and I can tell you the PSP slim is a lot better than the original and to me is a very good deal even to the Star Wars pack, which only comes with the, “Ceramic White” PSP with the Darth Vader logo on back, the charger, and Star Wars Battlefront the game. Now, why get this when you could get the sparkly silver PSP with the 1 GB memory card and a whole DVD at no extra cost? I couldn’t resist.

I do not work at Sony so I don’t know if the silver and white PSP are made in the same production line, but I can tell you that the white one was just put together wrong. When I got mine it had a dent in the back, a patch of pixels that would only show green, and paint that wasn’t painted in a smooth manner. These problems were NOT existing with my silver PSP. It has such a nice paint color and I have had no regrets with my purchase. There is a few cons with the PSP Slim, but the pros outweigh the cons if you are looking to purchase the new PSP model. It does have a cheap feel to it when you hold it and makes you feel like you could easily break it in your hands, but nothing has materialized out of those concerns. The problem there is that the PSP is just so light! Even with the oddly-light body weight, I have full confidence that my PSP will have a very long lifetime. The screen is the only other complaint that I have - you must get a screen protector when you buy the slim because the LCD screen will make weird blotches if you put even the slightest pressure, but when this happened to me it went away within an hour.

Games:
The PSP plays games using the UMD (Universal Media Disk) format media, which can hold up to 1.8 GB of data. This large storage capacity makes it easy for games to be made both long and detailed. An example of this capacity is the recent Grand Theft Auto ports. Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories are both ports to the PSP of the original large format games and they play very well. It is impressive to see how well the tiny UMD holds such a large game. There are hundreds of games out on the PSP so far and plenty more will be coming and from the ones that I have played there is a lot of different games being produced and a lot more creativity coming to this system, so it is worth the buy if you are looking for fun and unique games.

Conclusion:
The slim PSP is a great buy! If you are going to get a PSP its more available now than it has ever been and the deals on content packs are great. The PSP controls do not have two joysticks or even four trigger/bumper buttons forcing companies to come up with new ways of using the controller, which creates new types of games with exciting ways to play. The PSP also has a camera now, and Internet radio in the latest (3.80) firmware. It has been able to play music since its release making it a great MP3 player and it can play good videos on the 4.3’’ 16:9 ratio screen. It has been my favorite console for a while because in my opinion the games being created on the Xbox 360 are getting old and the PSP is getting better online/WiFi support every day.

28
Dec

Sony Vaio SZ650 Premium Laptop Review

By Taylor 2 Comments
Categories: Laptop and Reviews

Sony Vaio SZ650 Review
Sony is well known for their excellent laptop design, dating back to before physical beauty was a selling point to potential laptop buyers. Models like Sony’s X505 (reviewed here) ultralight, the thinnest notebook ever commercially produced to this day, set the bar very high for other manufacturers. The sz650 continues this tradition, with physical beauty rivaled only by a select few (Apple, Acer and late model Dell XPS). The premium full-coverage carbon fiber body is thin and sleek. The LED-backlit 13.3’’ screen is a marvel, bright and razor thin. The laptop spares no features but maintains a very light 4lb total weight.

Sony Vaio SZ650 Review
View large version here:
Flickr

Hardware: The guts of the SZ650 are top of the line and no expense is spared to built one of the fastest ultraportables on the market. My SZ650n/c model came equip with a 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo t7500 processor, 2 video cards (an intel X3100 and a nVidia 8400GS), 4gb ddr2-667 RAM and a 160gb hybrid solid state/platter harddrive. Other amenities include a biometric fingerprint scanner, an integrated webcam and an expresscard slot (complete with multiformat card reader in the box). The screen is a marvel as well, a LED backlit panel that is even and bright. This impressive featureset comes with a hefty pricetag – in my case, just exceeding $2000. However, it would seem that the cost is justified.

Software: The software should pick up where the hardware leaves off in excellence. However, in the case of the SZ650, it absolutely does not. Sony made the enormous mistake of loading a business branded laptop full of Trial softare, better known as “bloatware” or less elegantly, “crap.” Even worse, Sony does not include any sort of Operating System disks, so I couldn’t format the machine and remove the junk. Its not like there were a few programs installed for my convenience, the system was loaded to the gills with unnecessary and infuriating software. They even included a full length, multi gigabyte copy of Spiderman 2 that could only be played through their proprietary software, which I would consider hardly appropriate for a business notebook. This alone was almost enough to make me return it to the Best Buy where I had purchased it, but I was able to do a clean install using a Vista disk that I already owned.

Believe it or not, it was actually downhill from here. Sony’s (necessary) driver utilities are poorly built, resource intensive and barely functional. The ingenious-on-paper “hybrid graphics card” system, which allows you to switch between dedicated and integrated graphics to save battery life in situations that do not require dedicated graphics power, is crippled and very close to useless. Not only does it require a full reboot to take effect, the switching utility actually stopped detecting when I had changed the switch after about a week. I eventually did another clean install of Windows Vista and the driver resumed working (only to fail again). The wireless drivers were also questionable and often resulted in dropped connections while signal was excellent. I tested the Vaio alongside my Apple Macbook Pro (reviewed here), and it experienced no problems with wireless where the Vaio struggled.

Build Quality: In my time with it (about a month of constant use), the Vaio held up fairly well. However, shortly after I sold it (due to the immense number of problems I had with the software), the buyer complained that the left-click button had ceased to function and he also was experiencing some problems with the screen. I verified these problems and helped him work with the warranty to have it repaired, but no laptop should have significant hardware issues in the first month of ownership.
Sony Vaio SZ650 Laptop Review
View a large version at: Flickr

In conclusion - I hate to say it, but I do not recommend the Sony Vaio SZ650. For what its worth, the Dell XPS m1330 has an almost identical configuration available and I would be inclined to choose the Dell over the Sony in a future situation where I needed another laptop in this category. The SZ650 appears nice on paper and looks good on the surface, but that beauty is only skin deep and the prevalent problems keep me from recommending it. Look elsewhere for a 13’’ laptop with dedicated graphics, as Asus, Dell and others off comparable models without the garbage pre-installed and hardware quality issues.