My recent trip seems to have been a way to evaluate equipment I have. First I put my new netbook, an Acer Aspire One, to the test (like I am right now in writing this article while at the airport) and it has performed well. Both out and about locally, in the airport or in the hotel lobby, whenever I bring this little marvel out I have people asking me questions about it. Just now I saw a person looking for a plug for his big laptop. One person told him there were only a few plugs to a wall and it took the person another minute to find an outlet they could use.

My netbook has a 6 hour battery, so even though I used it a lot last night, tried getting a full charge this morning but I couldn't finish up. So I started out on the final leg of my trip with a 75% power reserve. I'm close to 50% power level left, which is going to give me 3 more hours of power.

It has been a great little performer and works well as a low cost ($350) alternative to a laptop computer.

The big star of the trip has been the video camera. I have the Canon HG20. I had a lot of time to kill before having to be at the airport, and boy did I get it. While walking in downtown San Diego going to the bus, there was a scaffolding accident. Window washers hanging from it, police on the ground, all the stuff of good TV. I had the Canon at the top of my bag, so I whipped that bad boy out and started taking shots. It took the first news crew 15 minutes to get there (and their studio was five blocks away).

I checked every single spec I could on this camera and I made sure it could give me full quality HD production. I wasn't as happy with the lens, because I wanted something that could get real close to the action even if I wasn't. Well, I wasn't the first ones to figure this out but with my camera I was able to pick up the men in the scaffold, who were ten stories above the street. I was able to zoom in quick and, though I am a control freak with this stuff, I let the camera do most of the focus work while I worked on the shots.

This is the scene I had when watching some of the activity going by. You had people using their cellphones or Flips to get the action. The local stations ran with everything from $10000 pro-sumer cameras (I priced many of them and can spot them yards away, but I was able to get shots of them shooting with my camera to confirm what they were using) all the way up to $150000 high end production models. Considering no matter what they used it was going to be broadcast on TV, and on HD in most cases, I figured the cameras had to meet some high specs to hit that level.

Now this is where the good deal comes in. I just went online and checked the local stations with the footage they had from the scene. Remember, they were using cameras that can have the footage used for a HD network broadcast. What I saw online matched the quality of shots I had! Better still, when I saw some of the close up shots of the rescue, where they were maybe 20 yards closer than I was because they had press badges, I had just as clear and close up of a shot of the rescue as they did!

As far as film production, I need to think about getting about 2-3 more of those cameras. With the quality of footage I got today, a person would be crazy to buy a larger camera. It’s amazing that something that fits in the palm of your hand has as good of quality as the big network cameras. That's just too good.