The Startling and Curious WatchCam Page

Where I reveal the true extent of my sadness by uploading images from my Casio Wrist Camera

hiya.png (4881 bytes) Hiya! Welcome to the snazzy WatchCam page.

This section happened in the strangest way: My employers were running a feature on mail order gifts for men, so we had a bunch of catalogues to wade through, picking out interesting examples of what was available. One company had an ideal gift for my father - a brass theodolite - and I took down their details, so I could look up their website later. When I got round to checking out the site, I couldn't resist looking through the whole thing, and eventually came across the Casio WQV-1 Wrist Camera, and fell in love. When I first received it, I couldn't actually think of anything to do with it...

Then, after taking odd 'test shots' at work and whenever I went out, I started finding little stories in the photos. Never one to keep these things to myself, I decided to actually write the captions out, apply them to the pictures and stick them up here, for the world to ignore. Groovy.

As watches go, the Casio Wrist Camera is a little oversized. It's got a tiny 'shutter', and an infra-red communications port right next to it. It's got lots of buttons, the most important of which is the camera snapshot button. When you set it in motion, the watch display shows a live, 16-shades-of-grey interpretation of the world, as seen by the camera. It needs lots of ambient light to work, but the results are generally pretty good. It's very obviously a Japanese watch as, although the character set is the standard western alphabet, the controls are back to front, and it's easier to type backwards... Since the text comes across to the PC as text, rather than as part of the bitmap, though, it's not all bad.

Since those halcyon days of Monochrome WatchCammage, I've 'upgraded' top the WQV-10 - the Colour Wrist Camera. The publicity images were excellent, but they were all faked. As with the mono WQV-1, you can download and upload images, so clever Casio got a nice collection of images together on their PCs and sent some into the camera. The photos the camera produce are often fuzzy and muddy, but they're not completely worthless. It's interesting to note, though, that technology magazine T3 slated both the WQV-1 and the WQV-10, listing a great number of frankly pedantic (not to mention sometimes inaccurate) complaints and concluding that anyone buying one would use it once then put it away in a drawer and forget about it. Tsk, eh?

Without further ado, have a look at what's on offer so far:

Get me outta here!