GoPro

I wondered if the GoPro-style action camera market had already become saturated back in January, now I’ve learned that Sony apparently doesn’t think so. At least one imagines that’s the conclusion they came to before deciding to join the competition with a camera of their own. They call it the Action Cam, and it clearly takes its design cues from Contour.

What does Sony offer to stand apart from the established players? 120 frames per second at 720p, WiFi, and SteadyShot is what they’d say, though SteadyShot takes the angle of view from 170° down to 120°. It doesn’t do meaningful still photos or timelapse.

It releases on September 24 for $270 if you’re still interested.

GoPro’s HD Hero 2 action camera is everywhere, so perhaps we’ll all be used to the fisheye’d images it produces soon. On the other hand, there are software solutions to rectify the image to rectilinear. Vimeo user Peter iNova has a few videos demonstrating his Photoshop action sets to straighten out an HD Hero’s output.

A person could probably significantly improve performance by giving up on Photoshop and building a video filter based on the Panotools image manipulation library.

My real interest is in correcting still photos, so some of the Panotools derivatives can help me out of the box. LensFix is a classic, but the developer has closed up shop for the time being. A little more searching led me to PTLens. Twenty five dollars buys the plugin, and a few moments with each photo will get rid of the fisheye effect.

The GoPro cameras aren’t among the list of supported cameras, but that looks like it can be resolved.

Bendy horizons are interesting a few times, but I hope soon I’ll be able to straighten them out. And, given that some cameras do this in firmware, perhaps the next GoPro camera will have the feature built-in.