Panasonic have released a waterproof, drop-proof and all round pretty rugged camcorder. The Panasonic SDR-SW20 benefits from using SD storage (SD cards are now made with up to 32GB storage) which is less susceptible to damage from drops and knocks. Think the memory card in your digital camera versus an external hard-drive and you get the idea about the relative robustness of the two digital storage systems. In return for being able to take your camera underwater, into the desert, up a mountain (hard-drive storage is usually dodgy above 3000m altitude) you compromise on image and audio quality (there’s no external mic socket and a single 0.8 megapixel CCD). But as the Panasonic website says:
…with its dustproof and waterproof performance, [the Panasonic SDR-SW20 is] the ideal camera for anytime use outdoors, in active situations, and for casual everyday video shooting.
Definitely one to consider for expedition use, and probably best suited to youth expedition teams creating web video and not suitable for those looking for video output for other purposes.
Ed Verillo kindly sent me a link to this site, a fun and interactive history of exploration.
The digital divide is set to lessen with a multi-billion dollar investment in connecting East Africa to the global internet super highway.
An article in The Guardian describes the current inequality:
East Africa remains the only large, inhabited coastline cut off from the global fibre-optic network. Reliant entirely on expensive satellite connections, people on the world’s poorest continent pay some of the highest rates for logging on or phoning. Local universities are charged up to 50 times more for bandwidth than a typical American college, making online research slow or impossible.
“Imagine you had all the students at Oxford trying to access the web through a single UK household connection,” said Calestous Juma, a Kenyan professor who heads the Science, Technology and Globalisation Project at Harvard University. “That’s what it’s like for most students in Africa.”
It’s interesting to think what this development will mean in connecting young people in the UK to those in Africa and being able to share richer content over the internet. It bodes well for a constructive and mutually beneficial youth dialogue.