Ajira.eu

I like multimedia. I love taking pictures of places I go to, and share them with the world. Unfortunately, a picture only tells so much. Video is even cooler! My cell phone makes nice photos, but crappy movies. So I decided to look for something better, and ended up with the Kodak Zx1 portable video camera.

The unit is roughly the same size as my cell phone, but is slightly lighter. It’s fed with 2 AA “penlight” batteries, though you can also use an external adapter. It has 128mb memory of which about 30mb is usable for storage, which comes down to about 30 seconds of video… I have no idea why they chose to put such a ridiculous amount of memory in the unit, but fortunately the thing also has an SDHC card reader. I bought a nice SanDisk Ultra II 32GB SDHC card, but the Zx1 doesn’t accept it. My photo camera doesn’t accept it either, but my laptops and main workstation do; so I’m not sure if the problem is with the card or with the cameras. I’ve made a support request with Kodak about the issue.

The camera can record video in 3 settings: VGA 640x480 pixels at 30 fps, HD 1280x720 pixels at 30 fps and “HD60” 1280x720 at 60 fps. Yes, this puppy can record HD video at 60 fps! It encodes the videos in Quicktime MP4 format with h.264 video and AAC audio. Aside from the video’s it can also make some semi-decent photos at a native resolution of 2048x1536 pixels.

So from now on, all “moblog” videos will be shot using the Kodak Zx1.