There were several issues I had with my previous camcorder. First of all it was one more thing to carry around. It was getting to the point that on vacation I would carry my large Nikon camera, Cari would carry a pocket camera, and then we would drag around another camera bag for our camcorder. Most times it wouldn't get used much outside of birthdays and concerts because it was too awkward to carry it around as a just in case. Cari's pocket camera and my cell phone takes decent videos anyway. So the camcorder sat in the closet most of the time.
The second major complaint I had was that the thing used tapes. It was annoying trying to rewind the tape and then record it over to the computer on firewire. A few times we picked up the camera to use it and we couldn't remember if we had transferred over the thing on the tape. It got to the point we were never comfortable just picking it up and filming for fear of losing something on the tape from before.
To solve those issues we picked up the Kodak xi8 handheld camera. This uses SDHC cards for memory, films in 1080 or 720 HD formats and takes still shots. It's small enough to fit in a pocket and weighs almost nothing. Like any digital camera, every time you hit the record button it starts a new file. No worry about losing what was previously recorded. It plugs into a USB port to get charged and also to transfer the files. It couldn't be any easier!
We've had a week to try it out and I am really pleased with the quality. Push a button to record and push it again to stop. I had the kids trying it out one night and the only problem that I saw was that because it is so small, it can be hard to hold your hand still. But if you are aware of the potential for a shaky video, that's an easy one to fix. Just don't drink a pot of coffee before using the camera.
We've already found that it is easy to pick up and get short clips if the kids are doing something you want to remember.
To go along with our new camera we decided it was time to upgrade our storage for those files. It was time for an external hard drive. I remember a day when having a 1 Gig hard drive was crazy huge. How would I ever fill 1 Gig? That's a ridiculous size. Heck, my first few hard drives weren't even 250MB.
This time we went for one that will last at least six months. 1.5T. I'm not sure what comes after the terrabyte range, but I'm sure we'll all find out in the next five years. Kids will be saying that 1.5T isn't enough to even be messing with.
The drive sits on the desk and has a display that shows how full (or empty) it is. It's just a hard drive, so there isn't much more to say about that other than it is a great companion to the Kodak camera.
We'll that's enough shopping for one week. If UPS drops off anything else I'll let you know.
1 comment:
This is going to be the most hi-tech backpacking trip ever.
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