Zi6

From Kaitlyn

So we have bought ourselves a High def video camera. It's in the new pda / star trek communicator / cell phone form factor. Meaning that it is small, and to my surprise I bought a kodak. I bought the Kodak Zi6 . I bought the unit from my favourite home electronics store london drugs, who happily price matched future shops sale price.

It records to an SDHC card and can record at 720p and upto 60 fps. It runs on convienient AA batteries and comes with kodak branded eneloops and a charger. Which is nice. Above and the video after it are from the new camera. Picasa web albums uses google videos which allows you to show hi(er) def videos, remember the original video is 720p so what you see is no-where near the quality of the camera.

The only down points to the camera are a lack of zoom and fixed focus. But this is a point and shoot version of a video camera, and at around $170 CAD you cannot compare it to the $600 - $900 hd camera. The only annoying fault is it's performance in low light. Instead of giving grainy but smooth video, the camera automatically increases the exposure time which in turn decreases the frame rate. The result, a not so grainy, but blurry and jerky low light video. Rumor has it a firmware update should fix this (or at least give the option to not alter the framerate) but I've yet to see this magical firmware update.

However this is leaps and bounds better than the video you get on an iPhone or any other point and shoot still camera and the form factor (which was the main reason we chose it) right now I believe you can't get much more bang for your buck.

So now I need to buy the Apple iLife pack so I can use iMovie.