Tuesday, January 10, 2012

******Retrofication-Technology Watch*******

from The Rundown email-newsletter, a report on Fuuvi's "The Bee"

Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, and now: you.

These iconic directors still swear by the grainy look of the ultra-portable 8mm camera, and now you can, too.

The Bee by Japanese brand Fuuvi is just that — a Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Camera-sized simulacrum of an old Super 8, but digital.

You won't need any Instagram-esque apps or post-processing software to get the grainy, jerky look of old-school 8mm, of which you can shoot up to 100 minutes of video on a microSD card. (Check out a video sample here.)

Seeing as the Bee's more or less designed for the rough-around-the-edges retro set, don't expect 1080i video, or anything close.

The lo-fi specs: You can capture stills and video at 640x480 pixels with the 1.3-megapixel sensor at 30fps. The shutter speed varies from 1/6 to 1/2500 sec, and a ƒ2.8 aperture lens.

But of course, that's plenty of power to shoot your own home movie or no-budget film — or, hell, both at the same time.

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