News update: Concept Luna, a new eco laptop, and the release of Sony's Airpeak drone

Here's another update of news from stories you might have missed, including a new eco friendly laptop, a new recorder from Zoom, and the availability to purchase of Sony's Airpeak drone.

Concept Luna laptop

Concept Luna - a laptop that is said to cut down 50% of its carbon footprint. By challenging the climate crisis, Dell is introducing its new laptop to change its ways to more “circular design”. This is being achieved by using more reusable parts. By relocating it’s motherboard into a cooler part of the laptop, it is said to cut down its power consumption. The result is that Dell can cut down its carbon footprint by 50%.

Concept Luna is designed to be easily repaired and reassembled, which will mean that the product life cycle is much longer. As a result, this will reduce the broken and outdated amount of parts that would normally be wasted. These features will reduce power requirements which enables designers to use a smaller battery with deep-cycle cells. Dell says this will provide a "long charge that can be maintained across many years of use, increasing refurbishment and reuse beyond the first product life services”.

In addition to the power efficiency, Dell is using  recyclable materials and renewable energy, such as hydro power, as well as reducing the amount of components needed for the laptop on top of reducing repair time. 

Zoom R20 has a new 16-track portable recorder with a touchscreen editing

The R20 is a compact all-in-one studio recorder with 16-tracks, integrated effects and a touchscreen for DAW-style editing. The portable recorder records in 44.1 kHz and at 16/24-bit fidelity. It also features built in EQ and effects such as 3-band equaliser, compressor, limiter, noise gate and reverb. Although many of these features are aimed towards musicians, we think it could be useful in film production, especially when mixing audio directly on set in different locations. 

There are eight different input channels: two of them are XLR-¼ and the other six are XLR connectors. Every input has a gain control, record arm button and level fader. You can apparently split, copy, paste, loop and move regions easily by using the touchscreen. All the tracks are colour-coded to correspond to the colours of the input channels.

The R20 works with SDXC cards up to 1 TB in capacity. In addition to the card, there is a USB/C connector to be used as an audio interface for computer or iOS devices. Another USB port connects to a Bluetooth adapter that enables wireless connection to a smartphone and for remote-controlling through R20 Control App.

The Zoom R20 is available from $400 (£300). Read more on the Zoom website.

Watch here:

Sony’s Airpeak is finally available for order

Sony announced its first drone back in January 2021 and now, you are able to order the Airpeak S1 for delivery on the 24th December. This is claimed to be the world’s smallest drone that is capable of shooting footage with a full-size mirrorless interchangeable-lens Alpha series camera. This is the first drone from Sony, but it remains to be seen how well it can compete with established offerings from DJI. 

The Airpeak is a brand new line of product, which is solely targeting professional photography and video production. It will be interesting to see how it positions itself in the highly competitive drone sector, which is currently dominated by DJI. The Airpeak is priced at $8,999.99 (£6.750) and you get:

• Aircraft
• 4 propellers
• Remote Controller
• 2 batteries
• Battery charger

Where Sony’s Airpeak excels is its ability to operate in high wind situations. Where an average person would struggle to stand upright in windy conditions, this drone proved to maintain stability up to around 20m/s. According to Sony, this outperforms the DJI Inspire 2.

The Airpeak 1 does not have an in-built camera, because it is designed to provide high quality aerial footage from a separate device. This is said to be an in-between solution for users wanting higher quality than a compact drone but don’t want to go to much larger systems that can handle medium- to large-sized cinema cameras. The Airpeak S1 is compatible with following cameras:

• Sony a1
• Sony a9 II
• Sony a7S III
• Sony A7R IV
• Sony FX3

Post & VFX

Adobe replaces Spark with a new Creative Cloud Express

Adobe has just released another software suite to replace Spark. The new free to use Creative Cloud Express aims to reach any content creator from zero experience to an experienced professional. If you were a Spark user previously, you will find all your content seamlessly transported to Express without any issues. You can find the Express suite on the web, but also in Microsoft stores and on app stores for iOS and Android.

What does Creative Cloud Express include? The suite is a two-tier service - free and paid. This includes different templates and over a million stock photos. With a generous amount of features, users are able to obtain Photoshop effects, filters, removable backgrounds, textures, resize elements and add overlays for the professional results. For videos, Express can trim, crop, merge, reverse and even change the speed of your videos. In addition to these features, the suite works as an image converter: JPG to PNG and vice versa.

What makes this suite truly for everyone is it’s user-friendly interface, which is easy to manage for new editors with no prior experience. Although you can upgrade from the free version to the paid one, for casual content creators, the free plan might be just enough to produce desirable content. With the paid subscription (£10 per month) you will gain access to up to 75 million more assets, 20,000 fonts, 100GB of storage, and usage to Adobe Premiere Rush and Spark Video. If you are an existing member, you will also have full access to the Express suite.

See the full features and pricing here.

“Creative Cloud Express is perfect for people with no creative training. But it’s also a great addition to the toolkit of creative professionals. If you just want to make a social media post, produce a simple flyer, resize an image, or craft a quick thumbnail image for your Premiere Pro video, Creative Cloud Express is the fast and easy way to go.” - Adobe