We picked up a Kodak Zi6 when they first shipped a few weeks ago, and have been playing with it, taking it through it's paces and evaluating it for both professional and personal use. It's a small 720p HD "lifestyle" camera, capturing to digital SDHC media. They sell for around $170 on Amazon, including a set of rechargeable AA batteries and a charger. It doesn't come with a SDHC card, which is kind of silly, since you only get about thirty seconds of recording time with the built in memory. So be sure you've got some digital media ready to go when you get the unit. You'll need it.
It's an impressive little unit, for what it does, and for what it costs. It's almost completely automatic, with very few customizable settings. On the pro side of things, we were interested in this unit as an HD lipstick cam, being able to clamp or velcro it to just about anything. For the price it's just about disposable, so I don't get too concerned about putting it in harms way. The lens is fairly wide, but certainly not a fisheye. There's a small slider to switch the lens into macro mode, and you can do a digitial zoom if needed. No optical zoom.
I've been experimenting with using this camera as a reference camera for shooting things like people giving powerpoint presentations. Shoot the speaker with our Sony EX-3, tight, but shoot the room with the Zi6, giving a reference for exactly which slide the speaker was on at any given time during their presentation. It works pretty well for this, with a couple of limitations.The biggest "Huh?!?" with this camera is that there is no "time remaining" indicator for the memory card. You have no idea how much remaining time you have. This sounds like a big deal (and it is) but on the other hand, you can put a 16gig card in there and be confident that your time remaining is "gobs," certainly enought to get you through a typical presentation.
The unit makes chirping sounds to indicate when you start or stop recording, and you can't disable them. This is could be bad in a pro situation.
So, over all, it's got come possibilities for pro use. I could see strapping this thing to a mountain biker or any other rough-duty location, and chances are it will perform fine. The HD video looks good, provided you've got a reasonable amount of light. (It drops down to 15 frames per second under low light situations.) The built in USB interface lets you load the footage into your Mac or PC as standard MP4 files.
What's been interesting, and unexpected, is how much we've been using this for personal use. We did a lot of recording over Thanksgiving and Christmas with this, mainly because it's just so easy to pick up and start using. Plus, you can stick it in your pocket, purse or glove compartment in your car and always be ready to capture video. The convenience factor has meant that we've been shooting a lot more video than we ever did with our Canon HV20. Havng no real zoom means it's not very practical for something like a kid's recital at school where you need to zoom in from the back of the room, but for family gatherings this thing is a lot of fun.
So, the bottom line, for us, is that this thing is a no brainer to have around for the price. We keep finding cool new ways to use it. The lack of features is somewhat frustrating from a pro point of view, but the size and low cost make up for a lot.
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