Cameras Reviewed for Stills and Video....

[SpecOps13]

Over the years, I've used the Original Sony Floppy Disk Camera. By todays standards it Sucks Big Time but it started the revolution away from film. I've still got it for use to document things in an emergency. The monster battery stays charged forever. No video capability at all, unless you consider 6 shots in one frame video.

I next moved up to a water resistant Olympus with XD Cards.. 4 mega-pixel, great pictures but still really no satisfactory video... I now use this camera for photos documenting work on the bikes or trucks...

My next step was to a Fuji Film 6 mega-pixel camera, still using XD Cards. Video was at a barely acceptable level and the sound reproduction was really lacking depth...

I then bought a Z915 Kodak, 10 mega-pixel, SD/SDHC Card. It has a 10x optical zoom and does surprisingly good 640 X 480 VGA Video. Sound reproduction is really good too. I started using it at our last Central Florida Tech Day with great success. Also did the videos for the Mark's Exhaust Thread and a video for the "Other Exhaust" thread of my Kerker on the 89 at idle.


Still not totally satisfied, I had some reward cards so I started looking at Pocket Camcorders. I refused to buy something that was So-So. I tried a Flip but it wasn't as good as the Kodak. Took it back.

Went out the other day looking for a Kodak ZI8. Every store I went to had older models.. Then we went to WalMart.. They had a Kodak ZI10. I didn't even know it had been released... $159.99 and it was mine... When I got home, I ran test videos. Started with 720 @ 30 frames Per Second, then went to 720 @ 60 FPS and 1080 @ 30 FPS. That's when I began figuring out what the SDHC Card Class meant, SPEED. The highest class card I had at this point was a Class 4. It was fast enough for 720 @30 fps but really chopped up anything beyond that.

I did some research and found that it needed a Class 10 SDHC Card at the bare minimum.. Not wanting any limiting factors, We went out last night to Best Buy and found a SanDisk 16gb SDHC, Class UHS1, Extreme Pro. It's over twice as fast at capture as a Class 10 Card... Wow, it cleared up any crap or artifacting at the highest resolutions... If the Sound reproduction is as good as I think it will be, this is the ultimate in Pocket Camcorders... Gotta do a bike running video and post it back here...

Hope this will help any of you looking for a great little Pocket Camcorder.

It will take a while for me to figure out this little camera, it's loaded with features including a 3" Touch Screen, on camera editing, a Share button the will log me into an account and upload a selected video through the computer, in the required format for the site...:biglaugh::biglaugh::biglaugh:

BTW, What are others here using?????? And, are you happy with the results?

Thanx,
Dave

 

[RaWarrior]

I have a Flip that I got as a gift, and it sucks. I mean I guess it's fine for people screwing around loading things to youtube, but the sound quality is terrible, the resolution only slightly beats out my cellphone, it has no zoom(digital zoom doesn't count), and chews through the AA batteries way too fast. For a dedicated camcorder, it really sucks. Modern smartphones have a better sensor and will take better videos, so there's really no reason to carry it around. Plus, the memory is fixed, the resolution is fixed, everything is fixed. There's a button to turn it on and a button to start/stop recording and that's really about all the control you have.

I have a Canon SD1000, which is a few years old, but takes acceptable videos, will shoot at 15/30/60fps, and the sound quality is OK, better than the flip by far but still essentially mono. It also takes 7.1mp stills, and is overall smaller than the flip as well. It also has a rechargeable battery pack that lasts forever.

The Hero HD I have is sweet. Full HD, or 720p at 60fps. Sound is good, even at speed. Only problem I have is there's no screen, so there's no way to "aim" the camera in a stationary position, you just have to kind of point-and-guess. It will take stills, but you have to fiddle with it's cryptic menu screen to get to that feature, and again, no viewfinder of any kind, so why bother. It can be set to take stills/bursts of stills on a timer instead of video if you want.

 

[SpecOps13]

Ra, you saved the day on this thread... If no one had replied by now, I'd have figured there was Zero interest. Thanx...

I just got back with pictures and a video that I did in a poorly lit garage.. The video is 720 @ 60 FPS. The sound reproduction
is pretty good, IMHO. The video's not something I prepared for, same unlit garage. Kinda rushed too. Wife was bugging me to
move on to her Honey Do List...

The video is shown at whatever You Tube accepts for resolution and speed..:confused2:.:ummm:

Considering the conditions, The pictures are fantastic. It was really unbelievable they turned out so well with almost no light
and the camera doesn't have a flash.. I work with Digital Photos every day. these came out needing No Correction to Color,
Contrast, Brightness or anything. They simply look exactly like what I took a picture of.

The Kodak ZI10 Rocks. If you're new to viewing You Tube Videos guys, let the video run through once to get it loaded into your
Ram Memory, then replay it. It'll be much smoother then....


Dave



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMd9KAWYWT8

 

[Fire-medic]

I also used a SONY Mavica floppy camera for 4 years in the early 2000's and liked the ease of transferring images the floppy gave you. Good for smaller prints, not for enlargements.

That made me get a SONY DSC-T33 Cyber-Shot, which worked well and gave good enlargements (Zeiss lens), to a point. It also took movies. It took a dump when I took it into a Live Fire Burn Instructor course and essentially exposed it to a level of heat from-which it was not protected. It gave me some good training shots, but now does not work reliably. I thought, "I'll just stay low..." Uh-uh.

My latest is a Olympus Stylus Tough 8000, 12 mp & movies, w/variable resolution for both video & stills. An all-metal case, shock-resistant & waterproof to 2 atmospheres. A great 'pull-it-out-of-your-pocket-&-shoot' camera. They have a newer model now. For my uses, this does pretty-much all of what I need, and sometime I may buy something else more-expensive, but I still shoot film on occasion. I bought an Olympus OM-2N SLR new in about 1976, and wish the electronics still worked reliably as I took some of my best shots w/it. My wife has a manual-focus Nikon film SLR, but I haven't used that in years.

You can't beat the digital convenience though.

 

[VMike]

We have a Sony Handycam model DVD-308 that is a year or two old and and it seems to work well. For still shots I use my Canon EOS Rebel and just recently got a new Droid X phone that takes pretty decent pics for a phone camera.lol! It's mind boggling on how many choices there are out there when it comes to cameras and electronics in general.It sounds like you got a good one Dave and it does nice videos.
Mike

 

[Redbone]

I use a the inexpensive Canon powershot A590. It takes good (not great) pictures and it's videos are not bad, either looking or sounding for a $100 camera.

 

[Woody]

i have a kodak easy share c813. And it takes damn good pics. cost was around 80 bucks.