Cars & Coffee – 9/4/10

Fog all the way down to Irvine, but even God loves this show apparently as the sun broke through right at the exit for Cars & Coffee. No featured marque today but several small groups of like-minded individuals made it feel like a massive showroom, with half a row of new Camaros, newish Mustangs, Cobra kit cars, Corvettes, Porsches, GTRs and Pontiac G8s today.

Highlights in the miscellaneous sections included a cute-as-a-button Fiat 500, Lancia Montecarlo, Lancia Appia Convertible, Mini Cooper, Fiat Spider, Porsche 356 Carrera, Sprite, E-Types, Pantera, Daytona, Mosler, Bullet-Nosed Studebaker, Boxster Spyder, Citroens, Bumble Bee Camaro, H.O. Catalina, Clubman, TVR, the 20-foot-long 1958 Continental MK III, Scuerias, 300 SL, 512 TR, Audi R8s, 400 Superamerica, two 458s, GT40 and some really sweet bikes.

Cars & Coffee 9/4/10

Swann RemoteCam perfect for 007 trainees

Perfect for James Bond wannabes (and pervs of all ages), the Swann RemoteCam is a tiny still and video camera built in the shape of a car remote control key fob. The RemoteCam shoots JPEG stills at 1280 X 1024 pixels, and records videos in AVI format at 720 x 480 pixel resolution at 30fps. A 2GB microSD card is included that will hold up to 25 minutes of video or 3,000 photos, but you can upgrade the memory all the way up to 8GB if you think you'll need more than that.

It's a little tricky to judge your shot, but practice makes perfect. This clever little key fob camera is very simple to use, with just a power button and a shutter button. The micro SD card pops in and out of the side and the whole unit is rechargeable through a micro USB port that can also pipe the pics straight to your computer. The pics end up looking like basic, low-end cell phone shots with a date stamp on them. That stamp can't be turned off though, and resetting it to the proper date and time is a bit tricky as well. In fact, I couldn't get it to change at all. Overall it's a fun little gadget with a few limitations that might make it a hard sell at its $100 MSRP. But if you need to shoot surreptitiously, there aren't many options out there this side of ringing up Q.

Street price is around $70 and the RemoteCam makes a perfect companion to Swann's other 007 spy cam, the Pencam.