Flip’s Mino has started a new rush in the field of camcoders by introducing the HD capturing capability. Now Kodak has introduced its Zi6 which according to many is the best camcoder so far because it can capture at 1280x720p and 60fps. Its 2.4 inch display is a little bigger than Flip Mino. Its not too compact but in terms of weight it satisfies you by weighing only 5.6 ounces. It runs on 2 AA re-chargeable batteries but the batteries are not rechargeable via the USB connector. You will have to pluck them out and put into a separate charger. The downside of the camera is its buit-in memory which is only 128MB out of which, you can only use 30MBs for recording videos. You can however expand its storage with a 16GB (worth $50) memory slot. The 2x digital Zoom seems too less but it is good in the sense that the video quality is not degraded at al when you Zoom-in.
Kodak Zi6 is not good in low light environments and the video seems to be dull in such a case. Similarly, it seems a bit slow. When you move the camera frequently, it take a few moments to get to the proper brightness and focus, thus giving dark scenes in the video. You will have to keep the camera still to avoid this. This a big drawback if you want to capture fast moving scenes. 2megapixel still capturing is also not enough for such a high end camcoder.

There’s no way to format the memory card from the Zi6. You cannot even delete more than one picture or a video at a time. Kodak requires you to connect it to a PC via its USB connector for such actions.
Zi6 has the capability of slow motion playback or fast forward. Mic is quite sensitive and the little speaker produces nice sound to satisfy you. IT also comes up with windows-pnly ArcSoft MediaImpression for Picture and video editing and single click upload to YouTube. It captures videos in H.264 and .mov formats so works fine with Mac’s iMovie.
Here you can experience a video captured with Kodak Zi6. The embeded video captured by Scott Stevenson and found on Vimeo doesnot do justice since its videos are capable of playing on HDTVs.

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