Opened the parcel, which came very quickly, contains one mid-sized plastic case and one VGA cable (extension, male-female). Removed the case and opened it to find a heavily insulated dark grey foam.
Burried in amungst the foam is my prize, a small red velvet pouch. I remove this last, after the slim manual, power charger, control pack and the eye wear. The safty glasses are strong and stylish, lightweight, heavy duty, wrap araound and comfortable. The battery/charger are Sony camcorder products, Lithium Ion quoted to run the SV-3 for up to eight hours !
Under nieth the charger is the power cable, but wait a minute, what connector does it have ? a US two pin ! The cable connects to the the charger with what looks like a standard '8' that many appliences use. Nothing is ever simple the Sony connector is not "OO" like a normal '8' but more like "DO" obviously designed to allow the plug to connect one way round. Hmmm, I weigh up the odds, do I stick any old cable in or wait for a replacment ? There is a camera shop just five minutes up the road so off I trot to see if they sell the Sony battery chargers (I knew they sold Sony camcorders), Well they do sell them but for around a hundered pounds !! I have waited many years for this I can NOT wait any longer, slam in an '8' from a Toshiba laptop power supply and ..... hey presto its charging. Hopefully I am not burning the unit out !!
Atached to the velvet pouch is the control box, it is housed in a rugged gortex style cover with belt loop. While charging, only one light is on but there are three others and three buttons. Slowly I thread the cable back to the soft pouch , undo the ties and slip out the SV-3.
Although the casing is matt black plastic the unit feels very solid, yet light. The screen is suspended from a transparent lens which in turn is held by the main arm, wich is supported by a light grey control arm (for positioning) and terminates with the clip on connector for the glasses.
In my hand now is something that few people have ever seen or even dreamed about, I bring it to my eye and feel myself being transported to another world. This is the future, it may change to be smaller and more descrete but this is the future ! (And damn is the future expensive !)
After the battery finishes charging I procced to find something to test it on, the laptop was my first victim. The manual suggested a computer source with the display set to 640x480, but of course Winows XP has grown out of such small resolutions so I got "the "no signal" light :(
I did not tink the system would be so fussy about the input signal, I expected at least a distored image. Still I had been planning for this day so I rebooted into Debian linux and tried CTRL+ALT+(+/-) to no avail. Then I remembered that the plus and minus had to be on the keypad, which of course the laptop does not have, so I tried CTRL+ALT+fn+(:/p) nope.
Something else must be running at 640x480 but what .... ah now I have an XBox that runs through a VGA converter so I can use a computer monitor as I had no TV handy.
Plug it in and WOW the game menu is floating in front of me, clear and crisp, the only problem was the XBox was using more than 64 colors so a few bits were the wrong color.
splinter
cell, sv-3 on the left and VGA monitor on the right.