In the scene in the movie The Social Network where Sean Parker which is Justin Timberlake’s character exclaims at a party that with the ability on Facebook to upload photos, everyone will be inspired to take their cameras with them everywhere they go and document all their parties and all their times together and put the pictures on Facebook. Facebook now has over 50 billion photographs, and everyone knows that what Sean Parker said came to pass however that was in 2004 when digital cameras were cool. Today, practically eight out of ten photographs on Facebook do not come from proper digital cameras, but from the cameras built into cell phones. People cannot be bothered too always carry a separate camera anymore  and the sales of compact cameras are on the wane. Sometimes, even having to fish your big slab of a smartphone out and to hold it steady to shoot still pictures or video on can seem a bit of a drag and that’s what this digital camcorder review is about a video camera that you can wear on your ear. It looks like something that makes you look like you are wearing a laser shooting device which The Predator always wore in the films.

It’s called the Looxcie they love crazy names these days and it’s a $200 Bluetooth-equipped video camera which looks like a tiny little jet engine that you clip to your ear. It connects to all Android smartphones  and phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry will have support coming shortly.  It works through Bluetooth, and it  allows you to record video hands-free. Think about it you have had hands-free audio for this long well isn’t it time you added video to the list?  Wearing it is pretty easy as you just adjust the flexible ear loop to sit on one or the other ear and it holds on pretty tightly. You can install the cameras app on your Android phone and then check out that you like the angle it points at, you enter your Facebook or YouTube information to help you upload to those services, and you’re good to go. You can then put the phone in your pocket and wait for something worth recording.

One of the best parts to the Looxcie is as any digital camcorder review on it must be at pains to note  that it records video in mp4 format to internal memory for a full five hours. When it is done this way, you don’t have to ever fumble for your camera or pull it out and try to capture a surprise event. You just leave the camcorder turned on at all times as since it has enough memory to record for five hours it will be instantly ready to capture the vital moment. When something finally does happen that you wish to preserve or share, you just tap the button and the Looxcie will instantly upload it to Facebook.

Of course, any digital camcorder review is obligated to say something about the quality  of recording and pictures involved. The Looxcie records at a  webcam-like 480×320 resolution and although the audio is good you do have to expect that the video quality will be somewhat less quality as it is trying to record hours of video into what is essentially is as small is your little finger. If the video quality isn’t all that important to you and if you really like the idea of the always-recording plan or if you are in law enforcement then maybe this could be the product for you. Or if you are a woman walking home through a dangerous neighborhood late at night, you could just have the Looxcie clipped to your ear. If someone attacks you, you can tell them that video has already been sent to Facebook, and unless they want the law breathing down their necks they should go.

Traditionally which is not very long in the case of digital cameras and camcorders, makers of these imaging products never had the nerve to stop participating in the big megapixel war, because they felt that this was the one thing that the general public understood about their products. If a customer sought out camcorders at the shop and found that one had 5 megapixels and the other had 4.2 megapixels then why would he choose 4.2 camcorder never mind that the difference would never show in the end results. However there is one company that’s finally bitten the bullet and called an end to all this madness and the product which has had the benefit from this is a new series of Canon camcorders.

The biggest thing is not only are more megapixels not necessarily a better thing but they can make things even worse due to the fact that the more megapixels  will only make a difference if they are fitted onto a sensor that was pretty large. This would make the product very expensive and so manufacturers try to miniaturize their megapixels and to cram them all into the smallest and cheapest possible sensor which in turn only degrades picture quality. You want full-size pixels and not miniature ones and so Canon has finally brought a little sanity to the camcorder and digital camera market by actually cutting down on the megapixels on a few of the latest Canon camcorder models.

Their logic seems pretty sound as when you shoot video on a camcorder, what is the best kind of TV you can watch it on? Usually, this would be a full HD television with 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. What that amounts to is about 2 million pixels or 2megapixels. So Canon would like to know why you would like 6 or 8 megapixels when all you are actually going to end up doing is watching your video on a 2 megapixel TV. Not only would too many megapixels on a camera sensor result in lower picture quality, such a high resolution albeit with poor quality picture would need extra processing to be scaled down to regular full HD which means all the extra processing would mean image quality degradation.

What you get with the latest Canon camcorder models such as the company’s HF-M series is a digital camcorder that uses the 2 megapixel sensors, this in turn make the pixels nice and large on the sensor, and also give you spectacular lowlight shooting abilities. Pictures shot in every kind of light are brighter, more vivid and more beautifully colored. It is pretty revolutionary and brave thinking to bring to a market that seems completely megapixel-addled. Let’s hope that people buy into it and Canon are  not left regretting their decision and other companies soon start to follow suit.