Kodak Zi6 versus the Flip pocket camcorders: The best camcorder for your pocket
The Flip pocket camcorders have sold over a million units in the US.
Long gone are the times when a camcorder had to be a bulky piece of equipment, destined to be lugged out only for weddings and other special occasions.
The popularity of video-sharing websites such as YouTube has revolutionised the way we record and share footage.
Camera phones have been at the forefront of this development, but dedicated pocket camcorders are now emerging, promising to make taking and uploading video as simple as possible.
We have previously taken a look at the Flip Ultra and the Flip Mino pocket camcorders. Both of these models have taken the US by storm, where they have sold over a million units thanks to manufacturer Flip’s no-nonsense attitude to straightforward video-sharing.
Kodak now looks keen to get in on the act, and the camera giant has upped the ante by squeezing a high-definition performance into the diminutive Kodak Zi6 pocket camcorder.
The best camcorder footage
Our biggest disappointment with the Flip Ultra and Flip Mino was the quality of the video footage. The low VGA resolution did little justice to colour differentiation, and the sluggish frame rate left an unfortunate juddering effect whenever fast-moving subjects were captured.
With this in mind, we were keen to see if the Kodak Zi6 could live up to its HD credentials. The Zi6 can record in 720p resolution, but interestingly, you can select to record at a frame rate of either 30 frames per second (fps) or an even smoother 60fps.
We were impressed by the 60fps footage we were able to take with the Zi6 – motion is noticeably smoother than anything we could capture with either Flip model. Panning shots tend to cause some juddering in the footage, however.
There is a significant loss to the smoothness of recorded video when you put the Zi6 into the lower 30fps HD recording mode, or the even more basic VGA mode – however, these settings require less memory as you record footage.
Videos will lose resolution after uploading to YouTube.
Viewing videos on YouTube
Unfortunately, the smoothness of the Zi6’s footage is lost as you upload videos to YouTube, and the resolution also suffers – this is due to the compression of user-generated videos uploaded onto the YouTube website.
Like the Mino and the Ultra, the Zi6 doesn’t do a great job of distinguishing between subtle colour differences, and its performance in indoor light is a little lacklustre.
However, when filming in very low light, we were impressed by the relative clarity of the footage, which we felt had an acceptable amount of grainy “noise” for such a basic model.
In our thorough tests, we were also impressed by the way the Flip Ultra handled itself in low light. See the full Which? review of the Flip Ultra for more on this model’s test performance.
The Flip camcorders do not have still photo capture functions themselves. The only way of taking a still image with the Flip models is to capture one from the recorded video footage when you are viewing it back on a computer.
The Zi6 allows you to capture still images in its own dedicated picture mode.
It’s worth noting that none of the models distinguish themselves particularly with the quality of their sound recording, and this is due to the very basic mini microphone devices they all rely on. Still, for YouTube quality footage, the recorded sound is likely to be satisfactory in all cases.
Set to 60fps HD recording mode, the Zi6 certainly wins out in terms of video quality. However, its performance is still a long way short of any larger HD camcorder.
The resolution and frame rate may have HD credentials, but the tiny lens and image sensor mean that larger models will outperform the Zi6 every time, picking up more subtle distinctions between colours and tones and panning with much more smoothness.
Check the Which? reviews of the best HD camcorders if you are interested in buying a model which will record your important moments in true HD quality.
Viewing footage on an HD TV
The Zi6 comes packaged with cables to allow you to view recorded videos on a high definition TV to let you get the most out of its 720p footage.
We connected the Zi6 to a 42 inch HD plasma TV and were largely impressed by the footage. The HD video stretched to take up the entire screen and motion was still smooth, though weaknesses in the colour depiction were rather amplified by the size of the screen.
By contrast, footage take with the Flip Ultra or Flip Mino tends to look rather unconvincing when played back through a TV. The larger screens quickly draw attention to the poor resolution of the footage taken by both Flip models.
Be sure to check the Which? reviews of the best plasma and LCD high definition TVs if you want a TV that will really impress you with its HD performance.