Throw your SatuGO!

http://www.satugo.com/

Simply throw SatuGO into the motive to catch the moment, where it hits you get a picture, or take air photos by activating the timer before throwing (it)(…) SatuGO is based on a simple wish to be able to take more fun and edgy pictures where the photographer is part of the action.

Camera tossing is a technique for taking pictures by throwing a camera in mid- air; it is fun and quite addictive, but it can be quite risky too, especially for newcomers: -“I failed to catch the camera, and it almost broke!”, a reader told me yesterday. Even though there´s many of us who have at least one old digital camera that we can afford to break, not every cheapo webcam has a built-in timer, which limits very much the scope of results you can obtain. In this way, I certainly can’t but applaud the initiave hold by freelance designers Eschel Jacobsen and Mads Ny Larsen, who have devised a camera which works best when tossed. The SatuGO (short for See, Aim, Throw, captUre and GO) is an almost impossible acronym but a very plausible concept. Externally it looks like a stylish webcam, and in fact it can work as a webcam, but the Satugo will take pictures when hitting something. Even more, it has a built-in timer, so you can throw it and it will take a picture while in mid-air (you can take regular pictures too, of course, and it has an internal 1GB memory). Nice, isn´t it?

So far the Satugo is a concept, but I don´t see any reason why it couldn´t be a success. Its main drawbacks, from my point of view, are the lack of an exposure time control, which would be very useful in obtaining spirograph-like pictures, a design which looks kinda fragile (you´re supposed to be throwing it so that it hits stuff), and a price, 69$, perhaps too high (though an estimate for now). The only other thing I didn´t like is more about the marketing in the camera´s web site (linked above): if you read the descriptions, there´s a point where it says: “SatuGO is not just fun and games. If you want to take SatuGO seriously then use it as your webcam”. Actually I think that the SatuGO should be marketed as the camera-of-choice for serious camera tossers; since the technique is getting widespread, but is still not globalised, there´s a chance that the SatuGo could become a synonym of it, much like the minimoog is for synthesizers. Or maybe not, but it won´t pass into History as a webcam (though a very stylish webcam -have I said this before? 😉 ).

All said, Eschel&Mads are searching for support, both from the manufacturers and the users. Their site is a little misleading in respect to how many people already have expressed their desire to buy the camera, but I’ll take the number of 4003 people, which certainly is not bad at all. There´s 52 pages of feedback in the site, with some interesting remarks and suggestions (underwater pics! nice idea, especially if you throw it and it falls in a puddle). Really, with some tweaks and that little bit of luck, this camera will rock&roll!!

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