Still torn HV30 or HG20, or wait...

[Shadow_7]

Cool, so you got it at Office Max for $100?

The Kodak website says it does 29 minutes continuous HD video recording.

Video specifications
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQueri...e=en_US#wg03_1

It shows 29 minutes. But that never seems to update even after 1 minute+ of footage. Statistically my SDHC card should hold over 2 hours of 720p footage. I'm not pushing the limits yet as I don't know the battery life of the supplied batteries. Or how to recharge them (USB or 3V DC port? or not at all). Appears to be the equivalent of 2x AA's, but the rechargable looking stock battery doesn't look much like dual AA batteries. The manual is pretty minimal, and menu options are pretty minimal. Footage looks a bit like that heat distortion you get off a hot roadway, but in terms of static / grain / noise on the image/frame. Enough of it to not get resampled out when converting to DVD 720x480 resolution. It also seem to suffer that skew issue associated with Sony camcorders if you pan fast.

And no, I got it off of craigslist for $130. No wait, still cheaper than walmart.com and an unopened box when I got it. It'll serve my purposes for now. Dude couldn't give directions worth a darn either. Meet me at the corner of I-15 and I-10. Okay, but where (there's four corners) and it's not exactly easy sailing during the lunch rush on a work day. You know what, I'm a few lights down the road where I could actually get off the road and park, you find me. And he did.

The cybershot only has a 2GB card in it anyway. And battery life of about 20 minutes continuous. Not sure about this one yet. Might be due for a stress test once the sun comes out again. I think the Mino HD might have the better image quality though (just no zoom, no replaceable batteries, no swappable storage). But it's a decent camera for the price. As long as you're cool with using results at 50% or less of the source image. Better than the cybershot where it was more like 10% of the source image to have an HV20 quality image.

It might be time for a full fledged kite cam effort with altitude for the cybershot. Now that the optimal tail length is better understood. Too short and the kite whips side to side and spins tangling the tail with the ground tether. Too long and the tail is too heavy to get airborne. Close enough and the angle of attack is improved for greater lift. And side to side instability is manageable in a non-turbulant initial flight area anyway. You still need kind of a strong wind to get off the ground though. And I might need a secondary tail on the cybershot to keep it from doing the twilight zone spin.

[Shadow_7]

Picture to Picture, the Z1085 smokes my cybershot.

Video to Video they're about the same, aside from the resolution difference. Once scaled to 640x360 from 720p, the image quality is comparable to the 640x480 of the cybershot. aka Video wise it's not that great. On the cybershot, the video is one of the better things it does (640x480 @ 25 fps). On the Z1085 it's one of the worse, relative to the other stuff the camera does. It should make a good YouTube clip (320x180).

Z1085 still image
http://home.earthlink.net/~shadow_7/Kodak_Z1085.jpg

Z1085 frame grabs (mplayer to png, imagemagick from png to gif for size reduction)
http://home.earthlink.net/~shadow_7/frame1.gif
http://home.earthlink.net/~shadow_7/frame2.gif

The grain should be fairly obvious. I used two consecutive frames to highlight it's effect relative to the video. If you toggle between the two frames anyway. Subject matter is kind of limited this time of year. And most images didn't come out as good as the still image. Oddly this camera (Z1085) seems to work best when the zoom is maxed. (digital zoom OFF / I think)

[Shadow_7]

And then the bad. The Kodak runs on 2x AA batteries. But not just any AA batteries. They must be Lithium AA's. And the only (in theory) rechargeable option is the proprietary Kodak battery. Tried with a universal DC adapter and what looks like the right plug size at 3V. And that only lets the LED blip on for a second then off. So only the proprietary power plug will work too. And I haven't found a battery meter on it, so I have no idea how much life is left on the battery. Can record 29 minutes continuous, but will the batteries last that long?

The only specs I've come across says 450 pictures from the stock battery. Is that with flash? With IS, with AF, ??? And according to a retail employee, Lithium AAs are regulated so I can't buy them in bulk the day of the gig. So far I've shot about 30 minutes of footage and taken roughly 80 pics. With downloading the media to the PC over the usb tether instead of the card reader. The batteries seem to be holding out, but I have no idea how much longer, until it stops working I guess.

I guess I'll start using the card reader for downloads, now that I know about the battery issue. For some reason I thought that this rechargeable looking stock batter was rechargeable, not disposable. As much as I dog the cybershot, it did come with a rechargeable battery with a charger. I can't even stress test this battery to get a feel for it's longevity because once it's dead, it's dead. And so is the camera until I buy special batteries.