There are two cameras on the Slate. One is in the middle of the back and has 2048*1536 resolution. The other is mounted in the upper left corner of the front and it's 640*480. That one's intended for teleconferencing, but it probably would have been better if it had been in the center of the top. (Maybe that wasn't possible.)

The camera app which comes with it allows you to choose which camera is active, and whether you want to capture video or still frames. So here's how ugly I've become:

Quality is pretty poor, but the light level is really low. Probably it would have looked better if it weren't 1:00 AM and not very many lights on.

And that picture makes clear why it's a problem for the camera to be off to the side. I'm looking at the center of the display, not at the camera.

Strange ideas that come to me in the middle of the night: OK, then, what happens if you hold it up to a mirror?

I had to use my chin to make sure I didn't drop it.

What I'm doing with the electric pen in my right hand is to hit that button, which triggers a frame grab.

UPDATE: It'll record video, too, or at least it claims to be able to do so. I tried grabbing 9 seconds of video using the bezel camera at 640*480 and the resulting MP4 file is 4.75 MB, which is about right.

But when I tried to play it on Alcyone, all I got was audio. MediaInfo says that it has a video track, running just shy of 20 fp2, and it's M-JPEG. That's "motion JPEG", a kind of poor man's version of MPEG2 which has the advantage of being fast to encode, but isn't very compressed.

AND apparently I don't have a codec for it, so Zoom Player and MPC both treated the file as sound-only. Interestingly, Windows Media Player played it properly.

I'll have to do some experimenting with it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 01:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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