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Tablet advice
I posted a while ago about whether I should buy a tablet, and now I’m going to do it. A video job fair is coming up, and I want to be able to show videos I’ve shot and edited in front of people. And I’m looking to buy something inexpensive but reliable.
I’m looking at this Samsung tablet, refurbished for $130. 1.2 Ghz processor, up to 64 GB additional HD space with a microSD card: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-Tab-7-Inch-White/dp/B00D02AGU4/ref=sr_1_1_m?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1396508102&sr=1-1&keywords=samsung+tablet
The resolution’s a little low, but that said…would it even matter? Unless it visibly degrades the picture, I don’t think it will make much of a difference.
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5 Replies
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I have the latest Nexus 7 tablet, which has an HD screen. It is probably closer to $199 but I love it. Vimeo looks awesome on it.
Dave
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Well, saving money is important to me. Would the $70 difference be worth it? Keep in mind I’ll just be using this to play mp4s (I imagine). And I only have this one event I’ll be using for for the foreseeable future.
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I bit the bullet and bought the Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 for a little over $100.
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I’m on my second Samsung tablet (a bit newer model), and they do a nice job. If you’re showing lots of video on this, you may want to rendering it directly at screen resolution (1024×600), which might result in smoother play and will definitely save battery life.
With a faster tablet I haven’t noticed it, nor on my 2+ year old phone, but awhile back, I found that Android didn’t actually handle multimedia playback correctly. Basically, the player would be fine, but it wasn’t locking video playback to audio. If the video decoding could keep up, no problems… but if not, rather than dropping a frame (which is the correct thing to do for a player), it just let the audio walk away from the video. This was hopefully fixed in Android 4.x — I have not seen it happen since then. But just something to watch out for.
And yeah, microSD is the right solution if you’re going to have lots of media to play back. It’s cheap memory, and obviously, if it’s fast enough for recording, it’s plenty fast enough for playback. I’d have recommended at least 16GB of internal flash memory, though Samsung does allow parts of applications to move to SD Card as well (that used to be standard in Android, but Google took it out, apparently some users found it confusing).
-Dave
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Well, we’ll see. I have a 16 GB mini SD card, which is more than enough space for the video I plan on loading onto it.
I’ll follow your advice on rendering to the Galaxy resolution and test it out. For now I’m just going to use it at this job fair.
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