On top of the world with the TX1

Just a quick posting with a few pics taken with the TX1 on my trip through Switzerland and Italy. So far we have been to Zermatt which has views to the Matterhorn and on the Glacier Express from there over to St. Moritz.

The TX1 has been a great companion to my Canon EOS 400D (Rebel XTi), and has proven top be exceptionally convenient as a backup stills camera (esp. with the 10x zoom), but more so as the 720p movie shooter.

Unfortunately I can't upload any movies at the moment, but here's a few pics from the TX1 so far...

On the way to Zermatt on the open windowed Matterhorn Gotthard Railway.

On the way up the mountain to Gornergrat on the Mattherhorn Gornergrat Railway.

View from Zermatt of the Mattherhorn, at widest angles, then 10x zoom

OK, that's it for now. I have to go and catch the Bernina Express from St. Moritz down into Italy. More soon. Matt

Where would you take your TX1?

Hey folks, I am going to be on holidays for the next couple of weeks, TX1 firmly in hand whilst I travel around Switzerland and Italy. We've got a pretty full itinerary, taking in Zermatt and the Matterhorn in Switzerland, then a trip on the world's slowest express train, the Glacier Express through the Alps across to St. Moritz. We have booked into the first class panoramic coaches so I am hoping for some pretty stunning scenery. After that we head south into Italy for a few days at Lake Como, then further down into Tuscany, Florence and finally up to Venice. If I can't manage a few keepers in the photo and video department then I ought to send the lot back for a refund!

I intend on posting from the road, but we'll have to see how accessible the Internet is in some of the places, and I don't know whether I really want to be sitting at an Internet cafe tapping out technology related stories when there are so many other relaxing things I could be doing - and more importantly, looking at.

I'm taking my cameras (EOS 400D, TX1), an iPod with Video and an E65 Nokia smartphone (for Gmail of course), but my mum who's over from Australia is outdoing me by packing her iBook, so you never know how many posts I might get in on the road!

Speaking of trips and vacations, if you had your pick of places, where would you want to pack your TX1 and head off to right now? And what other gadgets would you pack in your bags?

The purple haze

As TX1 use becomes more widespread, some people are beginning to report niggles and other dislikes of the camera. This is to be expected since people have a wide range of criteria by which they measure the success or failure of the newest bit of kit on the block, and of course we don't all agree with each other on whether these issues are a major problem or just a minor nuisance.

Something that is generating vigourous debate on forums at the moment is the issue of purple smearing and streaking when you point the TX1 at a bright light source whilst recording video. I noticed this from the outset when using the TX1, and wasn't overly impressed with how it looked, but also wasn't getting too worried about it until I started reading a few strongly worded comments on other sites - now I can't stop seeing it!

I was in New York City on the weekend and it was bright and sunny, with loads of reflections coming off buildings. This is where I noticed it the most. I have a couple of videos where the purple haze is really obvious and quite distracting to look at. But, and it's a big but, I took over 70 clips whilst in NYC and even though 60 of them would have been in bright light, I reckon maybe 3 of my clips have obvious purple streaks, and maybe another 10 have the odd purple artifact, the rest are completely OK.

To my gadget obsessive eye they jump out like the proverbial dog's bollocks, but I used the tried and true spousal test, and she didn't even notice them - I had to point them out, and even then she just said, 'is that because of the really bright reflections?' So in my mind, there you have it. It's not a deal breaker for me, it's just a minor annoyance that's a by product of the technology used in the camera (and not just this camera either).

I am a TX1 fanboy - why would I spend time writing this blog if I thought the camera was a piece of crap? That said I'm not loyal enough to blindly ignore faults with it. Some people are really not going to be happy about this problem, and it'll be enough that they'll send it back for a refund or pass on it all together. That's the great thing about the gadget market, there's so much choice around that we can all afford to be picky.

But in the end, the TX1 has so many more good points than bad, and that's why I'll happily keep using it - that is of course, until I really find something to hate about it, or something better comes along, maybe the TX2?!

Flash card performance on the TX1

We've had a lot of discussion both here and on forums about the performance (or lack thereof) from various SD and SDHC flash cards when recording high quality 720p HD movies on the TX1. It seems there is a wide range of experiences, ranging from good performance through to constant buffering issues and card failures - sometimes with the same card type in different units. Not good!

These are some of the experiences to date (updated 6th August 2007):

Card Type	Comments (recording high quality 720p 30fps video)
Transcend 4GB SDHC Class 2 (Best 4GB performance)	1 user reports good performance with camera formatted card Some minor buffer warnings but doesn't stop recording Over 80 high quality 720p videos of 5-60 seconds in length recorded with this card, with slow zooming Three 13 minute videos recorded with this card 1 user reports buffering problems and recording stops after 30 seconds
Transcend 8GB SDHC Class 2	1 user reports problems with buffering, and 1 user reports ocassional buffering problems 1 user reporting good performance without zooming, some buffer warnings with slow zooming, but apart from that, was able to record full length high quality 720p
Transcend 8GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports problems with buffering when zooming a lot 1 user reports problems with buffering after about 26 secs 1 user reports good performance with this card
Integral 8GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports problems with this card
SanDisk 4GB SDHC Class 2	1 user reports good performance with recording available up to the max. limit
Kingston 8GB SDHC Class 6 (Best 8GB performance)	9 users report good performance across the board
Kingston 8GB SDHC Class 4	1 user reports good performance with this card
Adata 4GB SDHC Class 2	2 users report problems with this card
Adata 8GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card
Apacer 8GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card
Adata 4GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card (has tried two cards)
Lexar 4GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card
Patriot 8GB SDHC Class 4	1 user reports good performance with zooming and able to record 10+ min videos in high quality 720p
Patriot 8GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card
Peak 4GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card (has tried two cards)
OCZ 2GB SDHC Class 6	1 user reports good performance with this card
OCZ 8GB SDHC Class 4	2 users report good performance with this card
SanDisk Ultra II 2GB SD	1 user reports good performance with camera formatted card
SanDisk Ultra II 4GB SD	1 user reports good performance with camera formatted card
Sandisk Ultra II 1GB SD	1 user reports good performance
SanDisk 2GB SD	1 user reports ability to record for over 2 minutes
SanDisk 1GB SD	1 user reports good performance
Qmemory 4GB 150x SD	1 user reports two cards that stop recording after 40 secs
Transcend 2GB SD	1 user reports buffering problems recording after 10 secs
Corsair 1GB SD	1 user reports buffering problems recording after 10 secs

These results have been gathered from commenters on this blog. If you have any further experience to add, please add a comment below. I'll keep updating the table as more information comes through.

Putting your TX1 videos on a slim fast diet

Monstrous! That's the only way to describe the file sizes produced by the TX1 when it comes to shooting video. Every second of high quality 720p video is a whopping 4.5 megabytes. Shoot for about 13 minutes and your 4GB flash card will be begging for mercy. But why?

The TX1 employs the Motion-JPEG codec to capture video. Some argue that this is a very inefficient way of storing video (because of the large file sizes), whereas others say that the method of capture results in better overall picture quality (than other codecs like MPEG4) because each individual frame of video is captured as if it were a still image.

Much time and many words could be expended debating the why's and wherefores of Canon's choice of codec. Personally I'm not too fazed by the large files sizes - and this is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, flash memory is coming down in price all the time. Before we know it, 32GB SDHC cards will be as cheap as chips, and suddenly 13 minutes per card mushrooms to over 100. The other reason is that these days there are so many different mediums to distribute and play your content - like YouTube, DVD, iPod, AppleTV - that you're inevitably going to transcode it to something else. And that's where this post kicks in.

I have taken one of the original example videos and transcoded it into a raft of other formats, from Apple TV and PSP to Windows Media, DivX and MPEG4 - with the intention of giving you an insight into the different formats and levels of quality available. The results vary from ropey through to impressive, and the reduction in file sizes is staggering.

All the transcoding was done using VisualHub software on a dual core MacBook Pro 2.16GHz and the results are in a table below. Compression times are noted and bit rates shown. Low quality is in 11Khz mono AAC, and standard and above is 44Khz stereo AAC for the most part. The difference between the quality settings is related to the data rate - i.e. - the number of Kilobits per second (Kbps). The higher the rate, the better quality video in theory.

The first file in the list is the original from the camera which can be used for comparison. Also for comparison are individual screen grabs of (almost) the same frame in each video. From those you can get an idea of the level of compression being applied to the videos. Just because a single frame looks rubbish doesn't mean the video will necessarily, as most compressed videos look much better playing than paused. Still it's an interesting insight into what's being compromised as the video is being compressed.

Format	Dimensions	File size (% of original)	Encoding quality/time	Single frame example	Watch video
Motion JPEG (from camera)	1280x720 (16:9)	119MB (100%)	Original (29s in length), 36.67mbps	View	Save
Apple TV (H.264)	960x540	1.7MB (1.4%)	Low, 518kbps (1m:40s)	View	Watch
Apple TV (H.264)	960x540	8.7MB (7.3%)	Standard, 2672kbps (1m:52s)	View	Watch
Apple TV (H.264)	960x540	15.3MB (13%)	High, 4705kbps (1m:49s)	View	Watch
Apple TV (H.264)	1280x720	15.3MB (13%)	High, 4700kbps (2m:41s)	View	Watch
Apple TV (H.264)	1280x720	21.9MB (18%)	Very High, 6730kbps (2m:51s)	View	Watch
Playstation Portable (AVC)	368x208	1.8MB (1.5%)	Standard, 534kbps (41s)	View	Watch
Playstation Portable (AVC)	368x208	2.8MB (2.3%)	High, 840kbps (44s)	View	Watch
DivX (Home Theatre)	1280x720	12.9MB (11%)	High, 3960kbps (1m:38s)	View	Watch
DivX (Home Theatre)	1280x720	21.8MB (19%)	Very High, 6694kbps (1m:39s)	View	Watch
Windows Media (WMV8)	1280x720	15.2MB (13%)	Standard, 5247kbps (1m:10s)	View	Watch
Windows Media (WMV9)	1280x720	24.8MB (21%)	Very High, 7764kbps (?)		Watch

For mine, the very high quality 720p Apple TV conversion looks the best as compared to the original. Weighing in at 18% the size of the original, that's not bad at all. The low quality Apple TV and PSP settings look the worst, but considering they are around 1.5% the size of the original, that's not too surprising. I don't have a PSP to try that file out on, but I'd hasten to say it wouldn't look too bad on the smaller screen. Offline I also did a conversion to DVD (MPEG-2) and it looked very good. UPDATE: The WMV9 file is stunningly good quality! (Thanks for the encode UP).

These results above are just one batch of tests. By spending some more time tweaking codec settings, it's likely that better results could be obtained. If you're interested in compressing some of your own TX1 videos but don't know where to start, there are some resources below.

Resources

• Mini-guide to video conversion and software
• Guide to converting to H.264 on Windows
• Guide to converting to WMV9 on Windows
• Encoding for Apple TV and iPod
• Encoding for AppleTV (Mac)
• YouTube help centre for uploading video

TX1 happenings

It's been a bit quiet on the TX1 front this week - I wonder how many more people have taken the plunge and bought one off eBay before they are released? If you have, be sure to let us know your first impressions.

Also if you have any contributions to the FAQ or have seen other examples of video kicking about on the interwebs, do let me know via the comments section.

I am off to New York for the long weekend (UK) and will be packing the TX1 to take some hi-def video of the big city. I am only going to be taking my 16-35mm wide angle lens on the DSLR so I am going to be relying on the 10x zoom of the TX1 for all the long shots. We'll see how that goes.

I have a post in prep at the moment regarding encoding TX1 videos from M-JPEG to other more 'slender' formats like Windows Media and H.264. I will post the results soon, and hope to recommend some good settings to get the best picture quality vs. file size.

Finally, if you're liking this blog, and you're inclined to do so, be sure to mention it in your travels on forums etc - the more people we get contributing, the better it will be.

The Canon PowerShot TX1 FAQ

UPDATED 10th June 2007.

This post will evolve to cover many of the most frequently asked questions about the Canon TX1, based on comments on this blog, discussions on web forums and other sources. If you'd like a question/answer added to the FAQ, or notice something's not right, add it to the comments section of this post.

This FAQ assumes you already know a little bit about the Canon PowerShot TX1 - i.e. - that it's a hybrid digital still camera and high-definition camcorder.

Table of Contents

1. About the Canon PowerShot TX1

• Where can I read up on the features and specifications of the TX1?

• Canon USA product home page
  
• Canon Japan product home page
  

• Where can I download the user guide (manual), drivers, software and firmware upgrades for the TX1?

• These should all be available in English on the Canon Support Site page for the TX1

• Where can I read reviews online about the TX1?

• There are a number of reviews of the camera available online
• The TX1 Blog first impressions
  
• Digital Camera Info first impressions
• Gizmodo first hands on
• DC Resource thorough review
• CNET thorough review
• Digital Trends full review
• Digital Photography Review full review
  

• What accessories are available for the TX1?

• A list of accessories is shown on the Canon USA product page

• Can I attach filters or a wide angle adaptor to the TX1?

• Filters possibly, wide angle adaptor it doesn't seem so
• There is a thread on the inside of the front of the lens which it's been though could allow the adding on of filters, but none seem to exist currently, and none are advertised by Canon
• The rapid retraction of the lens back into the main camera housing seems to suggest that no externally protruding adaptors (like a wide angle or tele converter) could be attached

• What types of memory/flash cards can the TX1 use?

• As of May 2007, not many TX1's were in circulation, and for those that were, there has been different experiences with different branded SD and SDHC memory cards
• See this post for the most up to date listing of people's experiences with different types and brands of flash cards
  

• What's the angle of the lens on the TX1 and how far can it zoom?

• The angle (in 35mm terms) is 39mm-390mm
• This equates to a 10x optical zoom
• 39mm is not considered to be a very wide minimum angle, however a 10x zoom on such a small camera is particularly impressive
• The TX1 also has the capability to set the digital zoom to 1.5x and 1.9x, with little degredation in resulting picture quality. At the 1.5x setting, the zoom range becomes 58.5mm-585mm and 1.9x results in 74.1-741mm. This can only be selected in 4:3 mode not 16:9
  

2. Video on the Canon PowerShot TX1

• Where can I see some example videos from the Tx1?

• There are 12 sample videos taken in bright daylight in this TX1 Blog post
• There's also a bunch here at Blip.tv (if you are the author of those and want attribution, please leave a comment)
• If you see any other collections, please leave a comment and a link to let me know
  

• What sizes and formats of video can the TX1 film in (e.g., 4:3, 16:9, HD)?

• 320x240 @ 60fps (4:3)
• 1,370KB/sec
• 320x240 @ 30fps (4:3)
• 746KB/sec
• 640x480 @ 30fps (4:3 High Quality)
• 1,920KB/sec
• 640x480 @ 30fps (4:3 Long Play)
• 1,020KB/sec
• 1280x720 @ 30fps (16:9 High Quality, High Definition)
• 13 minutes per 4GB, 4,480KB/sec
• 1280x720 @ 30fps (16:9 Long Play, High Definition)
• 26 minutes per 4GB, 2,280KB/sec

• See the Canon specs page for further info
  

• What compression codec does the TX1 use?

• The TX1 uses Motion-JPEG, which is essentially a series of JPEG compressed images taken in quick succession and strung together into a movie (for a more scientific overview of the codec, see this Wikipedia article)
• Many people believe this was an odd choice by Canon because it is not a commonly used codec for video cameras, and creates movies that are extremely large (in file size) when compared to more modern codecs like MPEG4
  

• How much video can I fit on my memory/flash card?

• It depends on the size of your card, but typical results are as follows (per gigabyte of memory):
• 320x240, 60fps - 10.5 minutes
  
• 320x240, 30fps - 18.5 minutes
• 640x480, 30fps - 7.5 minutes
  
• 640x480, LP - 14 minutes
  
• 1280x720, 30fps - 3.5 minutes
  
• 1280x720, LP - 6.5 minutes
  

• Why is the camera telling me the buffer is full?

• The data captured for movies needs to be written to the memory card quickly enough to save every frame you film. If your card is not fast enough to cope, the camera will start to 'buffer' the information, which just means it queues it up as it is trying to write it to the card. If the queue gets full, you'll get a buffer full message and your movie will stop recording
• So far it seems like any buffer messages tend to happen only when shooting in 720p HD mode, because the amount of data needed to be saved to the memory card is very high for every second you film
• See this post for the most up to date listing of people's experiences with different types and brands of flash memory cards

• I've heard I need a 'fast' memory/flash card to take 720p video, is this true?

• See above

• Can I zoom in and out whilst filming?

• Yes you can, full 10x zoom in and out
• Some flash cards have displayed poor performance (ie - buffering problems) when zooming in and out rapidly during movie capture. Check this post for more information
  

• Can I use macro mode and other camera features whilst filming?

• Many of the stills functions are also available during filming, including:
• Auto focus
• Face recognition
• Focus lock
• Exposure lock
• Macro and super-macro
  
• 10x zoom
  

• Can I take a photo whilst filming?

• Yes you can. It will be the same aspect as the video you are shooting (ie - if you are shooting in 4:3 it will be a 4:3 photo. If you are shooting in 16:9 it will be 16:9)
  

• How well does the TX1 perform in low light conditions?
• How does the TX1 compare to other HD camcorders?
  

3. Still photos on the Canon PowerShot Tx1

• Where can I see some example photos from the TX1?
  
• How many megapixels does the TX1 have?
• What's this super macro mode I've heard about?
  
• Can I take photos in 16:9 or just 4:3 aspect?
• How well does the TX1 perform in low light conditions?