Fish Creative Design Studio

I’m a tech enthusiast for sure, but definitely not a video expert. I’ve tinkered with some pro-grade Sony Mini-DV cams and poked around in Final Cut and Avid, but I don’t make my living producing video. This is a review from a very real-world, hands-on, subjective, opinionated perspective. I believe it doesn’t matter what the specs say if the experience can’t live up to them.

I really like that the Kodak Zi10 Play Touch comes with a good assortment of accessories out of the box:

• HDMI cable (although it is short)
• Soft carry case
• Hand strap
• Charging cord
• Quick-start guide
• 1000 mAh rechargeable battery

The Zi10 itself looks a bit “plasticky” for my taste. I like a more metallic, heavy-duty feel for my electronics. The upside is that, even with the battery installed, the Zi10 weighs very little.

I also don’t like the glossy finish, which attracts unsightly fingerprints in no time. I prefer a matte finish to anything that comes in contact with my fingers, but this isn’t a deal-breaker since it’s a purely cosmetic issue.

It should come as no surprise that the battery doesn’t ship fully charged. I left the Zi10 plugged in for about an hour before powering it up. When I did, it wasn’t fully charged yet, but definitely had enough juice to goof off with.

Setting the internal date and time on the unit revealed that the touch screen isn’t all that great. It’s overly-sensitive and takes a few taps to register a command in my experience. I also think the scrolling feature gives it too much momentum, so moving up or down the menu just a little bit becomes difficult.

I’m a tinkerer, so my first stop was the settings menu. I’m a man who loves options. I set it to full 1080p HD and browsed the other settings. I was pleased to find that one can set the microphone gain, LCD brightness, TV-out mode (NTSC or PAL), amongst other nice little features.

At this time I also noticed the switch on the top of the unit which controls the focus mode. The Zi10 handles close-up video nicely in macro mode, and normal mode for everything else. As far as I can tell, this is a feature lacking on other cameras in this class and price point.

I noted that when set to 1080p, my 16GB SDHC card can only hold about 2 hours of video (not the 2.5 that the card advertised). This doesn’t bother me for three reasons: I will probably never need 2 hours at a time, the cards are easily swappable, and the maximum card size is 32GB for a theoretical maximum of 4 hours at 1080p.

I started with a 5-minute test run. I walked around the house and yard, mixing a lot of factors:

• Low lighting
• Bright lighting
• Quick changes between low and bright lighting
• High color
• Still, slow, medium and quick panning / movement
• Loud and soft audio

After my 1080p test video, I shot a very similar run at 720p60. For the uninitiated, the trailing 60 refers to the framerate of 60 frames per second, as opposed to 1080p’s 30 frames per second. The extra framerate helps for high motion scenes such as sporting events.

My in-laws have a really nice plasma HDTV, so I thought I’d try the HDMI feature of the Kodak Zi10. I didn’t realize that the Zi10′s HDMI port needs a good bit of pressure to fully insert the cable. Once I found that out, the camera immediately switched to what I’ll call “remote mode.” The touch screen becomes a remote control for the video on the TV.

I was initially unimpressed with the video quality, probably because I’m a perfectionist and can easily spot compression artifacts and other imperfections. However, I found that these mostly resulted from the low light conditions of my first few minutes of footage.

Once I moved to a more adequately lighted area, the quality noticeably improved. I discerned fewer artifacts and more overall detail. The Kodak Zi10′s 1080p mode really looks great in good light and slow camera movement. Introducing a lot of camera movement did degrade the frame’s quality a bit, but not by much.

The Zi10 adapts very well to changes in lighting, making quick and automatic adjustments for exposure and white balance. Making very quick changes from dark to light conditions will frustrate it, but this is true of any non-professional-grade camera. Even though overall frame quality degrades somewhat in dark conditions, the frame does remain visible.

The onboard microphone is very sensitive, even at medium gain. It had no problem picking up little bird chirps and other subtle aural anomalies as I tested. Again, I really like that I can adjust the gain for certain situations if sensitivity is an issue.

It’s also worth noting that the Zi10 supports external microphones via a quarter-inch stereo input, for those wanting even better sound quality. This is another feature lacking in other comparable camcorders that I like.

This shooting mode produced a “smoother” video at a slight resolution penalty. The clarity and crispness of each frame looks slightly worse than 1080p mode, but the difference is not striking or unforgivable.

I did notice more “ghosting” artifacts in this mode, where parts of the picture “smear” across the screen. Once again, the difference is not horribly distracting, but definitely noticeable to the perceptive eye.

The extra framerate makes all motions smoother and more natural, even in slow pans. Strangely, in fast pans the framerate seems to flicker a bit, like the 1080p mode, albeit less.

In 720p60 mode I also tried the macro zoom setting, which makes tight close-ups much clearer. The overall video quality is very nice.

Switching from normal to macro mode introduced a hideous snapping sound into the audio track (due to the very sensitive microphone), so don’t plan on switching between normal and macro without some audio interference.

I decided to preview the shoots on my PC next. It’s really strange that the USB charging cable does not support data transfer; only the flip-out USB arm supports data transfer directly from the Zi10.

The upside is that the USB arm does simultaneously charge the Zi10, and one can always eject the SDHC card and copy data from an external reader if one wishes.

Transfer from my Lexar 16GB SDHC card took longer than expected. I found out that this probably has to do with its 6 speed rating; Kodak recommends SDHC cards with at least 10 speed rating for the Zi10.

Windows Vista reported a peak copy speed of about 3.12MB/s; about 1GB of video took close to 10 minutes to copy. I found this disconcerting, because the real-time video was about 10 minutes, which means the video copies to PC in real-time.

To be fair, this could result from a slow PC (Vista is notoriously slow at everything) or a slow-ish SDHC card. I certainly won’t fault the Zi10 in this realm, since I didn’t test it in optimal conditions. I fully intend to purchase a higher-speed SDHC card and test transfer speeds on my personal Linux boxes when the opportunity arises.

I decided to load up B&H to compare my purchase to other camcorders available, and immediately found that for the price I paid ($120 on sale at Target), I definitely got the best camera for my dollar as of the date of purchase.

I specifically compared it to the feature set of the Flip UltraHD, and found that the Flip lacks a lot of features that the Kodak Zi10 supports: removable/upgradeable memory, macro mode, and digital zoom to name a few. I do like that the Flip optionally supports AAA batteries (the Zi10 doesn’t), but that’s a small sacrifice for the Zi10′s many benefits. Flip’s website also notes that AAA batteries won’t last nearly as long as the built-in Li-Ion battery.

On the note of battery life, I haven’t yet depleted my first charge, so I can’t accurately comment yet. I’ve read that one should expect no more than one hour of actual use time per charge. Note that lowering the LCD brightness will almost certainly extend the life of the unit.

I don’t like that the Zi10 doesn’t have a flat bottom, so one can’t stand it up on a flat surface without the tripod, which is not included—a minor gripe, but a gripe for sure.

I also didn’t touch the Zi10′s social media sharing features, but it does natively support Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, Flickr and Email, amongst others. Sorry, no direct Vimeo support.

As of this writing, I can’t think of a better pocket-sized, entry-level HD camcorder for well under $200. The Kodak Zi10 Play Touch is lightweight, feature-rich and captures video with very good quality, certainly suitable for a video blogger or casual home movies.

Many argue that smartphones will replace handheld camcorders. For those only looking to produce video to share on social networks, this is probably true. But for those who want a dedicated device to capture home movies on for later editing and archival, an inexpensive handheld camcorder does nicely. I’d much rather accidentally trash a $120 unit than a $500+ smartphone, and I can’t easily lend my smartphone to a relative if I wanted to.