Your Perfect Social Media Input Device?

If you haven’t been paying attention to the continued improvements in handheld cameras, let’s just say that what’s being released in the handheld space is pretty amazing and you should pay attention if you’re involved in the ‘internets’ as a participant in any way and especially if you’re a social media user.

Back in April of 2007, I shot this SD video of the incredible ‘maker’, author, showman, and good guy, Bill Gurstelle, as he wow’ed the geeks at Minnebar with his potato bazooka. It was recorded with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX50 handheld camera which I’d purchased in the Fall of 2006 and, as you can see, it’s pretty good quality video, the sound is decent, and it does take great photos:

But now Nikon has announced their Coolpix S8000, a 14.2 megapixel, 10x optical zoom, 720p HD video, very low light (down to 3200 ISO), 4-way image stabilization, all for the great price of $299.95! That’s $100 less than I paid for that Panasonic over three years ago (which, I’m well aware, is ancient history in technology).

Though I’d always prefer to have my single device that can do everything (in my case, a 3GS iPhone) there are too many compromises with mobile devices and the low video and image quality disturbs me. The lack of “glass” on a mobile device lets in a lot less light and having the iPhone default to compressing both videos and photos before uploading means that most of the stuff sent to blogs, websites and social media spots look like crap.

So I’ve been thinking…

…about new tools to make my social media participation, blog delivery on this and my other sites/blogs better. That’s why I’m eager to test this camera and see if it will do what I want it to do.

The nice thing is being able to record photos and video on an SD card and then suck that in to my laptop for sending. When the Apple iPad was shown last week, I was instantly bummed out that it would NOT enable SD card reading which means that it will be useless as a media transfer and uploading device! Perhaps a Hackintosh netbook is a better investment after all since I would be able to use this camera in concert with a small, lightweight device with connectivity capability.

In any event if you haven’t been on the hunt lately for great social media input devices, keep your eyes open over the next few months as more of these products emerge since there will be many product introductions coinciding with the Photo Marketing Association show beginning February 19th.