Camera with Wide-angle Lens

This summer Kodak released the P880 which has a built-in wide-angle lens suitable for shooting interiors. The P880 also has a hot-shoe for attaching an external flash, which you will need if you are serious about taking interior photos. This camera appears to be Kodak's camera for shooting interiors.

The Kodak P880 and the CoolPix 8400 are the only fixed lens digital cameras I'm aware of that have 24mm lenses. All other fix lens cameras need wide-angle adapters to get down to 24mm and then most fix lens camera don't have hot-shoes so these two cameras are worth noting. They both are around $450 to 500 street price.

I've never used a Kodak camera (except the Kodak Brownie I used as a kid in the late 40's) so I don't know how the build quality is. Anyone used Kodak recently? For the full details on the P880 see the dpreview.com info.

Flash Virtual Tours?

Realtors want their virtual tours seen by the maximum number of potential buyers without having to download a plugin for their browser. To achieve that goal they need to understand the the installed base of the various plugins used in virtual tours. The best source for this data that I know of is: Macromedia's study of plugins .

This data does not exactly match my informal sampling of our buyers and sellers that we do business with. I find that the data above overstates the Java and QuickTime installed base of our clients. However, it appears to be the best data available.

So how do you use Flash in your Virtual Tours? The only Virtual Tour provider I know of that uses Flash is TourFactory.com . To verify this click on one of their samples tours and then click on one of the tour tabs that has a dot on it (dots indicate 360 or 180 degree views). When viewing one of these wide-angle rotating views notice the small links at the bottom of the rotaing image. One of them is Flash. Clicking on one of these links changes the viewing technology. That is, if a potential buyer doesn't have Java installed they just click on Flash and still can see the view.

Beware of Java Virtual Tours

In late 2003 we had a number of our listing clients that complained they couldn't see the Java Virtual Tours I did for marketing their homes. After asking questions and doing some research I discovered the reason was they didn't have Java installed on their PC.

I had assumed that Java was installed on most PCs. Apparently not! My personal survey of home buyers and sellers that try to view my Java Virtual Tours during 2003 and 2004 indicated that about 40% of PCs don't have Java installed.

The other fact I discovered is that even now (late 2005) PCs at Microsoft and PCs owned by Microsoft employees usually do not have Java installed. To understand why you need to understand that in the "Tech world" technologies get raised to the level of religious ideologies and Java is considered "un-clean" at Microsoft. Therefore they choose not to use it. So, if you are a Seattle eastside Realtor who is marketing to Microsoft buyers better not depend on Java virtual tours!

These facts convinced me to move to Flash for my virtual tours. The Flash technology comes standard on virtually every PC on the planet. The the technical controversy and confusion surrounding Java does not effect Flash. The down side is that Flash is slower and has lower quality images. But I've never found a potential home buyer that couldn't see a Flash tour.