By Andrew Liszewski
Most birdwatchers not only enjoy just looking at birds but also photographing them. So with this in mind a company called StereoVision has created a set of binoculars with a built-in 3.2 megapixel digital camera. But since most birdwatchers already carry a high-end SLR with thousands of dollars worth of telephoto lenses why would they even think of using these binoculars instead? Well for the simple reason that the VuCAM binoculars can take images in 3D!
Yep, that’s right. It’s the year 2007 and ‘3D’ can still be used as a marketing gimmick like it has been for the past 50 years. Once you’ve taken your ‘3D’ photos the images can either be viewed on a glasses-free 3D monitor, or with more traditional 3D displays. (Like using red and blue filtered glasses believe it or not.) And this is where I think the VuCAM missed a great opportunity. Maybe a handful of homes have some means to properly display 3D images so if the binoculars themselves could have been used to view them it would probably interest a lot more people.
The VuCAM binoculars are available on StereoVision’s website for $1,999.95 and includes 8x magnification, 256Mb of internal memory and will accept compact flash type memory cards.
[ StereoVision 3D VuCAM ] VIA [ Image-Acquire.com ]
Nah, this thing is junk. It’s just parallax and not 3D. You can do exactly the same if you bought 2 cameras and sticky taped them side by side – and you would get a lot higher quality and it would be cheaper.