Two Nifty Camera Accessories at Macworld

In walking the expo floor of Macworld, you sometimes stumbled upon nifty products that almost sell themselves. Two such products are Wrap-Up and the Millipod, convenient digital accessories for point-and-shoot size cameras put put out by Made Products, a Seattle based company that designs and manufactures accessories for digital cameras.

Wrap-Up ($19.95) is a lightweight cloth in which you can wrap your digital camera in, turning the wrap into an instant compact case with minimum bulk. The Wrap-Ups cases comes in different cloth styles and fits all compact cameras, but if you have a thicker size camera like the Canon Powershop G9 that I have, you should check with the company to make sure you get a wrap that best fits your particular camera. The case can stay fixed to your camera at all times. It’s very useful for traveling and providing constant protection to your point-and-shoot.

Made Products’s other accessory is the Millipod ($24.95), i.e. a minipod for you digital camera. If you’ve never used a trip-pod in low light situation, you’ve probably gotten less than perfect photos because you’re shooting photos at longer shutter speeds. The Millipod is a very small device that you affix to the bottom of your compact camera using a coin or screw driver. Two little legs are pulled out to set up the tripod.

The Millipod will keep your camera stable on a solid surface so that you can shoot say in self-portrait mode or at slower shutter speeds. While this accessory is a great idea, it does have a few limitations that come to mind for me.

For my compact camera, I use a standard three-leg mini tripod that fits into my camera bag. I can shoot both in portrait and landscape orientation with my tripod. With the Millipod, you can only shoot in landscape/horizontal orientation. Also, with this tripod, you can’t swivel your camera up and down. So unless you just want a very small tripod that you can keep affixed to your camera. the Millipd might not be the best accessory for you.

Made Products does offer the Wrap-Up and the Millipod at a combo price of $34.95. They sell a few other convenient camera accessories that you should check out on their Web site.