Just got two of these Oxycheq Raider 3W LED backup lights to replace my current ones. Mainly, I got these to replace my older backup lights that were a bit too big on my dive harness, I wanted something a bit shorter without giving up burn-time or brightness.
These lights are bright, as bright as a 10w HID cannister light for 1/10 of the cost, i.e. $700 for a HID cannister and $70 for one of these LED backup lights.
I’m taking them on a trip in a couple of weeks and plan on putting then thru there paces.
I LOVE my iphone but I miss have a scuba diving decompression program on it. Having this I can plan my technical dives on the device that I always on me, my cell phone.
I used to have jdeco on my Blackberry, and before that I had DivePlan on my Sony P800 and way before that Decoplanner on my Palm. But when I moved to the Iphone, I had nothing and I so I had to go back to my PC/Mac based decompression program.
However, on the horizon there is now hope: IphoneDeco.com. The site just went up and announced the development but not yet released version of a decompression program for the Iphone/Ipod Touch platform.
iPhone Deco works in conjunction with MyDecoPlan.com to bring an interactive, intuitive approach to dive planning for the iPhone. Open Circuit, SCR & CCR Dive Planning With Buhlmann/GF and VPM/B - Coming in June 2008!
MyDecoplan.com will give you a sneak peak on what they thinking. I can’t wait until June.
Red, the HD camera company owned by the founder of Oakley Sunglasses, has announced a new smaller version of there amazing camcorders. The Scarlet, shoots in the REDCODE RAW HD, up to 4096×2304, which is beyond current HD and is more in line with a 35mm film camera.
Translation: Awesome looking HD-video that should look as if it’s shot with a 150K camera.
The target price is rumored to be around $3,000 USD and should be ready sometime next year…or whenever they ship it.
Also, it should be a great little travel camcorder due to it’s size. The only thing missing is an underwater housing for it which I am sure could be built by Gates or Light and Motion.
easy to repair as most of the parts are off-the-shelf from places like REI/HomeDepot
It lacks:
the modular scrubber
integrated HUD
tool-less maintenance chassis, the KISS needs tools
These units are about the same in cost but know that both of these units are sold in units other than the USD so the price for these units fluctuates as the United States Peso Dollar moves.
Salvo Diving Equipment (Salvo) has come out with a new line of LED-based diving lights. LED lights sip power and are incredibly durable. but that usually came at the cost of being difficult to focus. Salvo has sourced a LED-emitter that they feel have fixed this limitation.
This line of LED-based lights have a 6 degree focused beam which is rated @ 50,000 hours. The light also has 5 output levels the diver can choose from, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100%. These means that battery bur- time can range from 4 to 20 hours depending on output setting.
They were so impressed with these LED emitters that that discontinued all of there 10 watt HID lights! They are also working on some versions for video lights but as of now, if you want bright video lighting, you are better off sticking with HID or HMI as LEDs haven’t developed into this space yet.
With all of the hype and hoopla over the iPhone, I wanted to give a short review of the phone that I recently switched to: Blackberry Curve.
I think the iPhone is a lovely, if flawed device, and I needed something that would hookup to my corporate email, be an excellent phone and had a full keyboard for my sms/emailing needs.
The Blackberry Curve solves all of this and has a pretty good media player to boot. While it doesn’t have the convince of playing iTunes store content, i.e. music, movies and TV shows, it does play a wide range of audio/video formats.
It has a decent camera as well which includes a rudimentary flash. So, while not a replacement for your digicam, it’s still good enough for those quick pictures, like when you are intoxicated and out with your friends.
I’m really impressed with this phone, it’s not as sexy as the iPhone but does a great job of coming close to it. The one thing missing from this phone is Wifi and Itunes support.
Trade shows are like the county fair, in regards to random products being sold. I ran across a lady selling bead jewlery, another booth was selling beef jerky (it was really dry), there was a guy painting an underwater mural and finally ran into a porn star.
Yeah, you didn’t read that wrong, Lori Pleasure, was attending and wearing next to nothing. From what I can read on her website, she does this attention grabbing stunt whenever she can. She has a Myspace page as well, but then again doesn’t everyone?
The Scuba Show was great, I’ll come back next year and hopefully it will be bigger and better.
I walking down the aisle and I saw a bunch of people standing around, so of course I stopped to see what was going on. The booth was showing a demo of a software product called DiveNav which is a scuba diving simulation “game” dubbed vDive. It was unique in the aspect that they mapped areas and you were virtually diving the topography of the area. In the demo, they were showing Casino Point on Catalina Island.
They were doing a survey and by participating in the survey you got a little holographic dive map of Casino Point. This represents the ONLY piece of swag that I picked up at this show.
Anyway, the product looks like a first person action shoot, Gears of War, Halo, and you see the world through your dive mask. You have gauges, can run out of air and you navigate underwater while swimming around. I found it boring and was struggling to see the market for it, alas this is what happens when you work in marketing. I realize that I’m not there target market but still I have an opinion.
The survey seemed like they had built a product and now where trying to figure out the market for it. That’s not a good sign in the software business where you can be obsolete in months. All the best to them, I hope they do well but I’m just more of a get-out-there-and-do-it kind of guy now and would rather go on a real dive.
Next up was the Ouroboros Rebreather, another UK company and a very high tech and high priced rebreather. The Ouroboros features a circular shaped scrubber which gives it a unique appearance. The use of this feature makes it look like the legendary US NAVY Mark 15 rebreather but this unit a lot more reliable and is CE certified.
The Ouroboros is made by the same folks who are involved with the Delta-P VR3 dive computer and this rebreather-friendly dive computer, is the integrated as the main monitoring handset. The unit features an L.E.D. based heads up display to notify the user of a problem. This one feature is very popular and is present on almost every rebreather at the show.
The unit is a little larger than AP Diving’s unit and these start at approx $17,000, depending on the exchange rate. This makes it the most expensive unit currently on the sport diving market.
I stopped by the Hydroptix Masks booth to see if there was anything new to see. I’ve seen these mask, read the reviews but never used one myself. The mask is curved, which expands the field of vision and allows a diver to see the correct size and distance underwater. The rub is that you have to be far-sighted to use it correctly. This is fine for those folks who are already far -sighted but for people with correct vision, you need to put contacts into your eyes to make you far sighted. I’m not a big fan of putting things into my eyes.
They had a water tank that you could stick your fact into and see the difference. Now, the thought of sticking my face into a huge tub of water where over a 100 people had done so before me, wasn’t appealing, but I suffer for my art.
I was able to see how the field of vision changed, it was blurry because I’m not far-sighted but it does expand the field of vision.
They have a hybrid mask coming out for folk who don’t want to deal with contacts but the mask is LARGE.
With all of the hype and hoopla over the iPhone, I wanted to give a short review of the phone that I recently switched to: Blackberry Curve.
