Pentax swings its pants
Although we are utterly devoted to new technology we have always harboured something of a secret crush on those 60s style 8mm cine cameras with their fantastic pistol style grips.
We can just imagine ourselves now using one to capture mini-skirted dolly birds breezing up and down Carnaby Street, or for filming The Chocolate Watchband and The Standells entertaining the in-crowd in some swinging joint off the Sunset Strip.
So full marks to Pentax then for delivering the MX4 a camcorder/camera hybrid with a pistol grip that’s just so 60s groovy it almost had us reaching for our bell bottoms.
It doesn’t only look the part (allright so we’ll admit the main body is more early 90s than 60s), its line up of features certainly isn’t retro as it takes four mega pixel still images, boasts a 10x optical zoom and captures video in the MPEG4 format recorded at 640 x 480 pixels at a rate of 30fps.
The only downer (man) is that video and images have to be stored on an Secure Digital card, so unless you stick in a 512MB card, you’ll only have enough space for an Andy Warhol type short, the update of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush will just have to be put on hold.
Still, the price (£379.99) isn’t too bad, and we are going to get to play with one next week.
