What is The Best Handheld HD Camera?

Double click video and click HD to see full size/quality.

There’s been a huge rise in the popularity of cheap, low-end HD cameras inside the last year.  Everything changed with the introduction of the Mino Flip in 2008, for the first time it was possible to buy a Hi Definition video camera for less than $200, and pop it in your shirt pocket.

A year later, there are hundreds of similar tiny cameras on the market, all promising to deliver fantastic quality for a low price.

I have been very skeptical about these small cameras, but recently curiosity got the better of me, and I had a play with a few of them in a local electronics store.  Several of them looked pretty good, but it was the Kodak Zi8 that really caught my eye.

I had read about their earlier attempt at a pocket HD camera, the Zi6.  The quality of the Zi6 was about comparable to the Flip, but it had lots of bugs in the firmware and was generally considered a bit cumbersome to use.  Upon playing with the Zi8, it seemed logical, responsive, and most importantly offered features that just gave it an edge over the other cameras I played with.

One of the problems of most of these pocket cameras is the audio quality.  While pictures at 720p may look crisp, audio through a small “pin-prick” microphone is never going to sound great.  Luckily the Zi8 offers an external mic jack on the side, which means you can use a wired or wireless microphone with it and get fantastic quality.

Another great feature about the Zi8 is that it takes SD Cards.  While a lot of the pocket cameras have built in memory, this camera is infinitely expandable, with the added advantage of being able to quickly swap cards to record for longer.

The Zi8 is also very Mac friendly.  It natively records in Quicktime format, which makes editing with iMovie and Final Cut a breeze.

If you don’t have the steadiest hand in the world, movies from a hand-held camera can look very wobbly.  Luckily the Zi8 includes Image Stabilization built-in, which works reasonably well at correcting minor shakes and wobbles.  Stabilization cannot work miracles though, so handily the Zi8 includes a standard tripod thread on the bottom.

Overall I’d say this is a fantastic buy, at around the size of a mobile phone it is very compact, and I think the results are very nice, I have included a demonstration video to show it off.