$399 Paper Weight

Above you can see a nice picture of my lovely $399 paper-weight.  It is a piece of junk.  And Sony is a piece of crap.  In all honesty I received this camera with gift cards.  But I would have spent the gift cards on something more reliable like a Cannon if had known.

Sony doesn’t care about its customers.  They gladly allow the 1 year warranty to expire on a camera that has market-wide problems without recalling them.  Because they know they can pull another $175 out of you to fix it – regardless if nearly everyone who owns the camera is having the same problem – and regardless that your only a month or two past your warranty.  And bad press!  Ha!  Sony laughs at the notion.  They don’t care!  “Poor little consumers.  They are so stupid!”  The Sony suits say, laughing at the same time.

So if you want to buy a Sony, don’t.  My camera will not focus and the battery runs out in about an hour….without taking pictures.  Google, “DSC-H5 Repair problems” and read for yourself.  If they’re bad about this, they’ll be bad about everything else.

I’m not bitter though.  Just bought a nice Cannon SD1100 IS.  Very excited!

Countdown Clocks

As most of you, I get tired of the same countdown clocks running every Sunday.  We have about 12 we purchased from somewhere and I just got bored with them.  In fact, some of them were just plain ugly.  Besides, I liked the idea of having a countdown clock match our series.

One day I stumbled upon some from Digital Hotcakes.

I take the series splash, import it into Final Cut, overlay the countdown, place it where I want and resize it using the ‘Motion’ tab, then adjust the Chroma Green key to make the green disappear – and just like that – a custom countdown for each series.  They have white and black of various font types.  Check it out and play around with it.  One cost $15 and I’ve used the same one since I bought it!