We saw the original Zigview a while ago but nothing stays still in the world of technology.

The original model was a nice idea as far as it went – the ability to see preview of your image when you’re not looking through the viewfinder (high level crowd shots for example) is one of the very few advantages point and shoot cameras have over digital SLRs and the zigview gives SLR shooters the same capability.

The new “R” model though brings a whole load of new toys to the party.

The Zigview R splits the view into 9 zones. In each zone it can look out for changes in brightness that indicate movement. If it detects movement it will take a photo. You can determine the sensitivity of each zone independently and you can also turn a zone off completely (if, for example one corner of your frame has branches being blown about in the breeze you don’t want that triggering a photo all the time).

This would be great for wildlife photographers in a hide – instead of sitting there all day waiting for something to happen you could just leave the camera suitably concealed and come back in the evening to see what had happened (you’d probably only want to do that on your own property though!).

If it is responsive enough (and I’ve not used one so I don’t know) it could also be handy for catching those events that human reflexes have trouble with – racing cars on the finish line for example.

As well as being a motion trigger it’s also an interval timer, fully programmable for the number of shots, the length of shot and the time between shots. The immediate use I can think of for this one is astrophotgraphy – You want 20 exposures of 90 seconds each 5 minutes apart? Not a problem.

It’s available from quite a few mail order places such as karlu.com