Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera (Raspberry) - Zi8 Raspberry

great product

8/15/2010

its a great camera, records in 1080p at 30 fps and at 720p at 60 fps (my personal fav setting, its great for recording fast motion. its standby battery life is really good and lasts over a month. fits a tri-pod in the bottom. its really easy to use, you dont even need to look at the directions and you will figure out how to work it right away.

Happy Happy.

8/14/2010

I bought one of these recently because my sister had gotten one and I didn't believe her how nice it was.
There's only two cons I've found with it. The first, it only comes with a 4 gb sdhc card and there's only about an hour of battery life with it, but otherwise, I love the silly thing. I just need to get another battery and a solar charger.

Cool little pocket cam

8/14/2010

I've had the zi8 for about a month and I'm really pleased with it. It's a fun little thing to keep around with you all the time. The video quality is just OK, but considering the zi8 is a pocket cam I honestly can't complain too much. It is what it is, and for the most part it does well.

No Internal Memory?

8/13/2010

As I read and re-read the product literature, nowhere does it say how long it will record without "expansion memory". I think this is a bit misleading, because you get a full 6 seconds of recording without "expansion memory".

Unlike other devices, this one has no internal memory, so you must buy an external card --- sorry, "expansion". Not much help when you try to do recordings and don't have that expansion card because nowhere in the product description does it say "will only record 6 seconds without an expansion card". I don't have problems with buying external memory - but say so in the product literature: "Must purchase memory card".

very frustrated.

Overall Very Good for Price

8/13/2010

Pros:

1. Portable.
2. Very good video quality for this range of product.
3. Very low price and good value.
4. SDHC allows you to use as much memory as you wish.
5. Image stabilization (See below) works pretty well.

Cons:

1. Battery life is dismal, only accepts proprietary batteries.
2. Image stabilizer works alright, but could be much better. It is suppose to "stabilize" footage, but there is still massive shake and blur if you are not careful. I am very disappointed in this feature as Kodak could have done so much better.
3. The HD mode is good, but the 60fps mode is much better and sharper.
4. The USB plug is convenient, but is on a cheap piece of bendable rubber that I cannot imagine lasting long. The idea is to give you more angles to plug it in, which is nice, but it just seems non-durable.
5. Still-camera mode is terrible and takes fuzzy pics.

Overall: The pros outweigh the cons. For this low price, you are getting very nice video, even excellent at the right settings. Image stabilization, while not very good, still at least exists, and this is the only such product with that feature. Upload to my Mac could not be simpler: I did not even install any software. I just plugged it in and there it was on the desktop. If you are interested in an entry-evel but good video camera, you could not do better than the Kodak.