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CNN Sunday Morning
Interview With Suzanne Kantra
Aired August 10, 2003 - 09:49 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SEAN CALLEBS, CNN ANCHOR: We can add yet another acronym to our lexicon. DMD, digital media device. It's not just an audio player, not just a video player, but also an audio and video recorder, all in one tiny package. You can take it wherever you go. Read all about them in "Popular Science" magazine.
And Suzanne Kantra, tech editor for "Popular Science," joins us from New York to tell us all about them. Good morning to you, thanks for coming in.
SUZANNE KANTRA, TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, "POPULAR SCIENCE": Good morning.
CALLEBS: You've got a lot of little things here. Let's get right to it. Let's talk about the first one; I think it's the Panasonic SV-AV30?
KANTRA: Yes, we have a Panasonic SV-AV30 here. And I took the liberty of taping CNN last night just to show you how easy it is. You place this into a tiny little docking cradle and plug in the cable from your satellite box, your cable TV. And you can record up to 30 minutes on the card that comes with it. But if you have a more -- 64- megabytes, but if you have a one-gigabyte card, you could do eight hours. If you were traveling across the country, you could easily put a couple of movies on here.
CALLEBS: And this sells for how much?
KANTRA: $399.
CALLEBS: To me, that's amazing. What, 10, 15 years ago, a good VCR was $399. Now you can fold this thing up in your pocket and just entertain yourself forever. I mean, the world is changing.
KANTRA: Exactly. It's not just a video recorder, it's also an MP3 player, a voice recorder, it can take digital still images. And that's one of the things that a lot of people carry with them, MP3 players; adding video capability's just going to be the next step.
CALLEBS: OK. Let's move on to the Archos-AV320. Now, this plays MPEG 4 files...
KANTRA: This plays MPEG 4, yes.
CALLEBS: OK. Now this one's a little more pricey? KANTRA: It is, but has 20 gigabytes, which means that you can do 40 hours of video. You see here a movie called "Ice Age." And you can hook this up to your DVD player.
Let's say you're traveling to Tokyo. You can load this up and you're going to have as many hours as you have flight time to be able to view videos. So this is a great thing for business travelers.
CALLEBS: For someone who spends a lot of time on planes, I know what's going on my Christmas list.
Let's talk about the AVCam 300. You've got to love this thing. It has an attachment, as well, correct?
KANTRA: Yes. Actually, it goes with the Archos, and you plug it into the side, and then this is a four-megapixel digital camera as well as a digital video recorder. So this makes Archos much more flexible than some of the others.
CALLEBS: Why don't you do that once more, because I think we picked up the camera shot a little bit late.
KANTRA: OK. So this little piece here is the video camcorder and also a still camera. And then it hooks on to this piece here. So you see an LCD screen here as your viewfinder. So it just makes it a little more versatile.
CALLEBS: And the quality, amazing?
KANTRA: The quality is very good. One thing that we've noticed is that if you take something off the web and download it as an MPEG 4 file you get great quality. We hooked it up to a plasma TV. You really didn't see a lot of artifacts. But if you hook it up directly to your own DVD player, the resolution is going to be not so good in terms of plugging it into a regular TV for viewing. But on the small screen, you're not going to notice any difference.
CALLEBS: OK. Suzanne, I think this is one people are going to be talking about as well. The RCA, basically, video jukebox.
KANTRA: It is. And this, again, has that 20-gigabyte hard drive. It hooks up very simply and easily to any kind of video equipment. So you can quickly and easily, you know, watch your videos. You can put digital still images on here. You can also look at MPEG3 files.
CALLEBS: Can you play that for us?
KANTRA: I can't play this one. This is showing a still frame right now. This is not going to be coming out for another few weeks, so we didn't have a working model here. But the quality that we've seen in the prototypes is very impressive.
CALLEBS: OK. Well, we now have a reason to bring you back in a few weeks, right?
KANTRA: Exactly.
CALLEBS: OK. Suzanne Kantra, thanks very much for bringing us up to date on this Sunday morning. A lot of neat gadgets. Appreciate it.
KANTRA: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired August 10, 2003 - 09:49 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SEAN CALLEBS, CNN ANCHOR: We can add yet another acronym to our lexicon. DMD, digital media device. It's not just an audio player, not just a video player, but also an audio and video recorder, all in one tiny package. You can take it wherever you go. Read all about them in "Popular Science" magazine.
And Suzanne Kantra, tech editor for "Popular Science," joins us from New York to tell us all about them. Good morning to you, thanks for coming in.
SUZANNE KANTRA, TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, "POPULAR SCIENCE": Good morning.
CALLEBS: You've got a lot of little things here. Let's get right to it. Let's talk about the first one; I think it's the Panasonic SV-AV30?
KANTRA: Yes, we have a Panasonic SV-AV30 here. And I took the liberty of taping CNN last night just to show you how easy it is. You place this into a tiny little docking cradle and plug in the cable from your satellite box, your cable TV. And you can record up to 30 minutes on the card that comes with it. But if you have a more -- 64- megabytes, but if you have a one-gigabyte card, you could do eight hours. If you were traveling across the country, you could easily put a couple of movies on here.
CALLEBS: And this sells for how much?
KANTRA: $399.
CALLEBS: To me, that's amazing. What, 10, 15 years ago, a good VCR was $399. Now you can fold this thing up in your pocket and just entertain yourself forever. I mean, the world is changing.
KANTRA: Exactly. It's not just a video recorder, it's also an MP3 player, a voice recorder, it can take digital still images. And that's one of the things that a lot of people carry with them, MP3 players; adding video capability's just going to be the next step.
CALLEBS: OK. Let's move on to the Archos-AV320. Now, this plays MPEG 4 files...
KANTRA: This plays MPEG 4, yes.
CALLEBS: OK. Now this one's a little more pricey? KANTRA: It is, but has 20 gigabytes, which means that you can do 40 hours of video. You see here a movie called "Ice Age." And you can hook this up to your DVD player.
Let's say you're traveling to Tokyo. You can load this up and you're going to have as many hours as you have flight time to be able to view videos. So this is a great thing for business travelers.
CALLEBS: For someone who spends a lot of time on planes, I know what's going on my Christmas list.
Let's talk about the AVCam 300. You've got to love this thing. It has an attachment, as well, correct?
KANTRA: Yes. Actually, it goes with the Archos, and you plug it into the side, and then this is a four-megapixel digital camera as well as a digital video recorder. So this makes Archos much more flexible than some of the others.
CALLEBS: Why don't you do that once more, because I think we picked up the camera shot a little bit late.
KANTRA: OK. So this little piece here is the video camcorder and also a still camera. And then it hooks on to this piece here. So you see an LCD screen here as your viewfinder. So it just makes it a little more versatile.
CALLEBS: And the quality, amazing?
KANTRA: The quality is very good. One thing that we've noticed is that if you take something off the web and download it as an MPEG 4 file you get great quality. We hooked it up to a plasma TV. You really didn't see a lot of artifacts. But if you hook it up directly to your own DVD player, the resolution is going to be not so good in terms of plugging it into a regular TV for viewing. But on the small screen, you're not going to notice any difference.
CALLEBS: OK. Suzanne, I think this is one people are going to be talking about as well. The RCA, basically, video jukebox.
KANTRA: It is. And this, again, has that 20-gigabyte hard drive. It hooks up very simply and easily to any kind of video equipment. So you can quickly and easily, you know, watch your videos. You can put digital still images on here. You can also look at MPEG3 files.
CALLEBS: Can you play that for us?
KANTRA: I can't play this one. This is showing a still frame right now. This is not going to be coming out for another few weeks, so we didn't have a working model here. But the quality that we've seen in the prototypes is very impressive.
CALLEBS: OK. Well, we now have a reason to bring you back in a few weeks, right?
KANTRA: Exactly.
CALLEBS: OK. Suzanne Kantra, thanks very much for bringing us up to date on this Sunday morning. A lot of neat gadgets. Appreciate it.
KANTRA: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
