Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Sony Album T

The day after the BERSIH rally was held, I was up early to catch the launching of the new Sony Album T digital camera (also known as the DSC T2). Earlier on I was already informed that there would be an early bird promotion for buyers.

I had hoped to get a bargain but nearly lost the intention when I saw the length of the queue, despite reaching at 9am. Some came as early as 5am, and I heard the first person in line (who got the camera for RM11.11 by the way) had camped since the afternoon before! Really nobody can beat Malaysians when there's a good deal up for grabs.

So after standing in queue for more than 4 hours (and without a toilet break), I finally got my hands on the shining new camera at a price of RM888.80. Heck it wasn't as cheap as I expected but it's a good number no? Still it was a good deal as the retail price would be RM1399.

Blue is my new favourite colour

At this price, you get a 8.1 megapixel CCD along with the standard 3x optical zoom for a compact in this price range. It was also nice to have a 2.7 inch touch screen and Sony's Super Steadyshot thrown in. With the intuitive touch screen interface, using the camera was a breeze. No more buttons to confuse you.

The feature that sets it apart however must be the built in memory - a total of 4GB of space on board! With that amount of memory, a memory stick would be needless as more than 1200 photos at full resolution could be stored internally.

One of the features I found nifty was the 'smile shutter' mode. When the camera is set to this mode, the lens will automatically detect when a face is present and the shutter is depressed automatically when a smile is detected.

It was really quite fun trying out this feature for the first time, though I doubt I would use it often. After all, what's taking a photo without the classic "1, 2, 3, smiiiiiiiile" tagline? It would be useful however if your subject wasn't paying attention, hence saving the work of repeating the whole process.

Apart from that, you can also edit and add drawings to photos stored in the camera using the stylus. Another nice feature although I'd still use Photoshop for editing.

Sample photos that were taken turned out good when viewed from a PC monitor. The anti-shake function was superb too, maybe even better than my old Panasonic.

I thought Sony could have improved on Playback and Scrapbook buttons though. These two buttons are only one of the few that you can find on the back, and yet I did not feel comfortable at all using them. The buttons were tiny and too deep in so people with large fingers might find it hard to press down.

Overall, the Sony DSC T2 is a very classy, elegant camera and it comes with all the features that one would expect from a compact camera, even with some extra nice touches thrown in. At the price I got it, I would definitely say it's a good buy.

Technorati tags: sony, cybershot, dsc t2, album t

thought completed at 9:25 PM | 2 comments

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Independant journalism

After reading (or rather, not reading) what was published in the Star yesterday and today, I decided to subscribe to Malaysiakini.

Even though I was not able to attend the BERSIH rally, I'd say some good came out of it.

thought completed at 9:57 PM | 0 comments

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Saturday, November 10, 2007

Comeback rant

I know I haven't posted in a while, and I didn't intend to actually. I just couldn't resist venting out my frustration and anger over all the stupid tactics the government used to prevent people from turning out for the BERSIH rally.

If you have no idea what the rally is about or have't even heard of it, I strongly suggest you throw away your usual reads (ie mainstream papers/news) and start to get educated on INDEPENDANT news.

As it turned out, I left home after lunch today to head back to KL, one and a half hours before the march to Istana Negara was supposed to start. I left a whole 1.5 hours earlier as I thought it would be just nice for me to reach the KJ station and hop on a train to the centre of action.

But no, as if the rain was not causing enough trouble (there was a pretty serious accident involving some vehicles on the Karak Highway), those dumbskulls who call themselves the poh-lis decided to crash in on the already-bad congestion just before the Gombak toll.

Vehicles were caught in a near standstill, about 10km from the toll booth. I was inching along, cursing under my breath that this could not be a worse day for me. After nearly an hour stuck in the jam, I finally saw ahead of me a police block set up to check each and every vehicle that went through the highway.

The traffic congestion was inevitable, since those morons had closed off two lanes and creating a bottleneck in the traffic flow. And the strange thing was, I did not notice them flagging people down for speeding (I would've known as I was going 110 on an earlier stretch), nor were they checking for road tax.

After reading some articles about road blocks being set up in various parts of KL, particularly the main entry points in the city, I came to conclude that the men in uniform were actually keeping an eye out for people who were attending the rally. I could not confirm this though as I was not wearing a yellow t-shirt when I was driving (I'm pretty sure they would have asked me to pull over and interrogate me if I was).

So to poh-lis at the Gombak toll booth, I salute you! I salute you for creating the worse jam I have ever experienced while driving on the Karak Highway. I salute you for coming up with ingenious ways of putting traffic to a standstill. I salute you for causing a delay to my scheduled trip to Dataran Merdeka. I salute you for driving me mad enough to post this rant on my blog which I thought I would never update.

Replace the words 'I salute' in the paragraph above with the word fuck. Now that makes perfect sense, eh?

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Anway I heard the rally went well. As George Lucas would put it, the Empire strikes back.

thought completed at 11:59 PM | 2 comments

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