GoPro Release The HERO3

30% smaller, 25% lighter and 2x more powerful - the main features of the new HERO3 camera by GoPro. The company have today released three versions of the amazingly popular wearable and mountable camera. Priced at £179.99 the basic 'White Edition' boasts the new smaller, lighter and more powerful features along with the 1080p quality of the original HD HERO camera.

Next up is the 'Silver Edition' which has a few more features brought over from the HERO2. With 11MP still photos and a brilliant automatic photo capture feature. Priced at £279.99 it's not too bad.

The cream of the crop though and the edition everybody should buy is the 'Black Edition'. With ultra high definition 4K at 15fps this edition offers amazing quality in such a small package. It's also capable of ultra-wide 1440p at 48fps. With 12MP stills this edition offers everything you'll ever need in a camera of this type. Included in the Black Edition is the brilliant Wi-Fi remote, normally an £80 extra. With a price of £359.99 you certainly get great value for money.

The development that makes the HERO3 stand out from the previous versions and the competition is the fact that ALL of the versions now come with built in Wi-Fi which makes them all fully compatible with the great GoPro App.

All in all then the HERO3 is a fantastic camera but you really need to get the Black Edition to get your monies worth. I certainly can't wait to see some shots in 4K Ultra HD.

In the UK the White and Silver editions are available to buy now but the Black Edition's not available until the end of November.

Do you have a HERO3? What do you think of it?

Lytro Goes Global

A year or two ago a revolutionary new camera hit the market - the Lytro Light Field Camera (LFC). This was the first consumer Light Field Camera to be produced. If you're wondering what an LFC does then just have a look and click on this picture.

So an LFC is a camera that captures light from every plane, that's light travelling in every direction. A conventional camera captures light from just one plane. This means that with the Lytro camera you can refocus your pictures time and time again after you've taken the picture, so you don't have to worry about focussing before taking a picture - the ultimate point and shoot.

Well Lytro cameras have been available in the US for about a year or two but they are now available in more countries. Earlier this week Lytro announced that their cameras will be available in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada as well as more outlets in the US.

Let's hope that they come to the UK soon and that this brilliant technology becomes the norm.

Do you have or have you used a Lytro camera? What do you think of it?

Digital Meets Analog

We've all been there, we have a notebook full of notes from a meeting or just doodles about a possible new project and for a number of reasons we want to digitize them - we may want to just have backup copies, need to send them to another person(s) or for a tonne of other reasons. It's not exactly a hard thing to do, you either type up your notes or take a picture with your phone but who really wants to write out their notes twice and what if you have drawings? Taking a picture of your notes is the perfect solution then. Well not quite, when taking a picture you just have a static picture, what about the content?

The hugely popular Evernote service has teamed up with the even more popular Moleskine Notebook company to come up with a way of combining both handwritten/drawn notes with the digital world. To do this they've created the Evernote Smart Notebook. The notebook features unique dotted ruled or dotted squared pages that allows Evernote to read the page better when taking the photo, these special dotted lines apparently help Evernote to read your handwriting better and ensure the page is not skewed when saved.

The best feature of this is the handwriting recognition which makes all of your handwritten notes searchable. This may not seem like a huge feature but trust me, it is.

The new Evernote Smart Notebooks also come with a stack of stickers that you place around the page. The idea is that Evernote picks up the smart stickers and knows which note belongs where in your Evernote account and can add tags and more to the notes depending on which sticker you use.

You also get a 3 month Evernote Premium subscription with your notebook which has a whole range of upgraded features which should make this a more than useful new service.

Although I have no doubt that this will be a useful product/service combination I'm still not convinced there will ever be a perfect solution to combining the analog and digital worlds.