NYT reviews camera-binocular combos

The New York Times' David Pogue went bird watching and came back with reviews of just about every camera-binocular contraption he could get his hands on. On the whole, they seem to be better at being binoculars than digital cameras, but Pogue finds the Bushnell Compact Instant Replay (seen above) to be the best of the lot. They're small, fairly inexpensive ($220) and capture pictures and video as good or better than any of the competition. But, remember, these are all first-generation gadgets, so we can probably expect some serious improvements before too long.

[Ryan gardner @ Dec 19th 2005 2:14AM]

Those binoculars are sweet. I did a hands-on demo with them at the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake. Although a stupid point - the salesman made a point that using the optics of the binocular with the 2 megapixel camera to take a shot of a detail far off in the horizon was better than taking a 5 megapixel shot with a consumer cam and zooming in. (Duh)

The instant replay feature that they are trying to sell it on (and naming it after) it is stupid in practice.

I'm a gadget enthusiast who has used a half-dozen different cameras in my day and their rep had to explain to me how the stupid thing worked. (It's confusing)...

[wolssiloa @ Dec 19th 2005 2:14AM]

stalkers of the world rejoice!

[Heyuan @ Dec 19th 2005 2:14AM]

Wonder how decent is the batt life of such gadgets?

[TheZodiac @ Dec 19th 2005 2:14AM]

Here is why most of these suck: the digital camera dosnt use the binoculars lenses as their opitcal system, which is pretty much stupid and a waste of space. Its just like having taped a cheap digital camera to your binocular. Junk.

Geeks.com had these for $129 last month. a 1.3MP for under $80.

Cute idea, with a crapply implementation of technology.