Kodak z812IS model thoughts please

[MarkInCleveland]

HI...

I have owned the Z812 for over a month now and love this camera!

Here are some Z812 pics taken this past weekend.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13065200@N06/

[bigdawg]

MarkInCleveland wrote:

HI...

I have owned the Z812 for over a month now and love this camera!

Here are some Z812 pics taken this past weekend.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13065200@N06/

Some nice photos there Mark.

Dawg

[MarkInCleveland]

Thanks. I am a beginner in the truest sense. I hope to have more "fall color" pics this weekend.

[Deltasac]

The Kodak Z812 IS has and engineering or technical problem of over modulation, distortion, and lack of AGC Automatic Gain Control limiting loud or live music, or stereo playing in the background during recording still image add on sound or during HD or Video recording. My $30 audio cassette recorder has better AGC and sound recording level control that this Kodak model. The sound recording level cannot be adjusted, and any other than a normal soft speaking voice behind the camera results in unusable, distorted, over modulated audio not fit for consumer use.

Kodak customer service, technical support, says it's normal to have distortion with live music, when a lesser canon still digital camera records audio and maintains AGC audio just fine in the same environment. My cassette and MP3 voice recorder do a better job at recording audio than this Kodak model Z812 IS does.

I have sent sample audio and video files to Kodak and they have not responded as to replacement, repair, or 30 day money back guarantee. I have challenged them, and they have charged me for two of the same models pending receipt and evaluation.

Still, Video, and optical performance and features of this Z812 IS the best I have seen, and one of the first with HD Video and Stills in the HD wide screen 16 x 9 format. Optical Image stabilization works excellent, and the optical zoom is awesome. One exception in video you cannot pause the video and resume. If you stop or attempt to pause it terminates the session and closes the file.

Another major problem is the lens adapter 43 to 55mm/lens shade that screws in to the 43mm thread at the end of the 12 x optical lens make a horrible looking round black shadow when the [default] wide setting at turn-on with stills or video recording or exposures. Unless you zoom in a bit this black shadow will ruin a lot of exposures, or you will have to crop the pictures to eliminate the lens adapter shadow. You cannot use flash with the lens adapter in place, or uneven shadows result, and the lens cap will not fit on the end of the 55mm lens adapter. I thought the lens adapter was for the purpose of using accessory lens, filters, and a protection UV filter to keep dust and smudges off the large surface 12 X optical lens.

My previous 6 year old Kodak DC4800 had a feature to turn off the back display at the touch of a button to save battery power, this Z812 doesn't, so the min time I believe after you take a shot and after a brief review the large 2.5 " display is brightly lighted for a minimum of one minute if you have the display time set or power down set to minimum.

No external flash sync jack or shoe exists on the Z812 IS, and Kodak says that slave external flash will not work with this model. My 6 year old Kodak DC-4800 3.1 MP/Zoom had external flash that could be used with any external flash to extend the flash range.

This Z812 IS has two microphones for stereo PCM audio [Terrible audio distortion and AGC as mentioned above]. The supplied mini USB2 audio video cable has a yellow video out, and a white cable [RCA Plugs] for monophonic audio out. In order to hear stereo you must either use the HD dock which BTW has only component video out [Three cables, Red, Green, Blue] and left and right audio RCA jacks for stereo out, or you must remove your media SD card and play back the file on your PC or Laptop to get stereo sound which is sub par to any digital camera with video and audio recording that I have seen or heard so far. One still audio feature is that you can add narration or sound up to one minute and tag that image/file for slide show playback with audio if you are in a very quiet area or no background music or live music is playing, otherwise the audio from this Kodak Z812 IS is almost unusable, distorted and sounds terrible.

Kodak should be ashamed of themselves for releasing a product at the leading edge of technology and performance, and HD quality with sound and AGC that is unusable, distorts and the user has no manual or user adjustable setup or controls, and by not letting consumers or beta testing in the field point out the deficiencies and areas to correct before production and final release.

Kodak finally agreed after sending attachments and sample audio/video and still recordings, to charge me for another Z812 IS and have my less than 30 day old Z812 picked up and returned to them. I will reply as to the status of the unopened Z812 IS as soon as I test it under the same conditions as the other, to tell if it was a bad Z812 IS or this is deficiency and problem with the latest high zoom, performance, and HD still digital camera with HD video.

Deltasac [y-IM]
G Bart, Sacramento, CA
Naturist & Nudist Photographer

[Alan T]

Deltasac wrote:

....My previous 6 year old Kodak DC4800 had a feature to turn off the back display at the touch of a button to save battery power, this Z812 doesn't, so the min time I believe after you take a shot and after a brief review the large 2.5 " display is brightly lighted for a minimum of one minute if you have the display time set or power down set to minimum....

If this is the case, it'sa big backward step from the Z712is. The screen on mine is hardly used, except to show images to other people, or if (really!) I'm acrobatically photographing the wound underneath my big toe, or otherwise poking the camera somewhere where my eye won't go.

I'd assumed the models 612, 712, 812 were very similar apart from the pixels. The button to the left of the viewfinder switches off the screen on the 712. This needs to be done separately for shooting and viewing modes, toggled with the 'review' button on the right of the screen.

The video & sound facilities don't bother me. I tried it once on the 712, and didn't like it. If I want good quality video I use a camcorder, and I understand reasonable ones still use digital videotape.

Good luck in getting your camera sorted out.

[ac.smith]

Sounds like at least some of Detasac's complaintscome from a failure to do any research at all and also to read the manual.

1) The Z812 has the same switch on the back to switch between the LCD and the EVF as the Z612 and Z712. In this respect the Z812 behaves in exactly the same as my way as my Z612 and Alan T.'s Z712 and, as Alan T. does, most of my shooting is with the EVL. Detasac's DC4800 has an OVF as does my 2MP DC5000so the LCDcan be switched off except for macro, review and menu usage. Since the Z#12s have no OVF either the LCD or the EVF must be used to take a picture.

2) External flash connection - my DC5000 didn't have one either nordo any Z#12s have external flash connections.Under some narrowly constructed conditions I can sync an old set of studio strobes with my Z612. The last Z with external flash sync was the 7590, I think. None the less a number of the more expensive competitors of the Z#12 camera have also not provided an external connection including the Sony H2/5, H7/9 and the Canon S3. Canon's rethought the issue and included an intelligent hot shoe on the S5.

3) An almost weekly topic in both this forum and the forum at DPReview is why can't I get a wide-angle lens for the Z#12 and the reason is that the lens extends as it moves from wide-angle to telephoto so any adapter must be long enough to clear the lens at full telephoto. This will cause vignetting ("horrible looking round black shadow") at wide and near normal settings. I must zoom to 56mm equiv. on my Z612 and I'd guess it might be 58mm equiv. on the 712/812. This isn't really a secret. I have the adapter tube to attach the S-K 1.4x tcon but I leave the tube attached to the tcon and unscrew the whole assembly.

Theunstabilized 10x lenses on the Z650/710/740/7590 do not extend when zoomed to telephotoso their adapters do not cause vignetting and wide-angleconverters may be used. This was also true on the P850 and the P712.

[Alan T]

ac.smith wrote:

why can't I get a wide-angle lens for the Z#12 and the reason is that the lens extends as it moves from wide-angle to telephoto so any adapter must be long enough to clear the lens at full telephoto. This will cause vignetting ("horrible looking round black shadow") at wide and near normal settings. I must zoom to 56mm equiv. on my Z612 and I'd guess it might be 58mm equiv. on the 712/812. ...

I get vignetting at full 432mm equiv zoom on my Z712. It's one of my few disappointments, but I can live with it. It's an almost unnoticable darkening inthe four corners, which means that panoramas look terrible in the sky, unless you overlap so much at both ends and for each shot that that bit isn't used. I can live with that as well. I had begun to think, but not very hard,about a wide-angle adapter. I don't do a lot of architecture and it would cost me a large fraction of the purchase price of the camera, and I'm not bad at vertical panoramas.

Of course you can see it in the shot further up this thread that I'd forgotten about!

BTW I still use my Casio QV-5700 (last but one digicam) for its external flash sync socket sometimes, and keep it full working order with AA Hybrios so it's ready for action.

Best wishes,
Alan T

[ac.smith]

Alan T wrote:

I get vignetting at full 432mm equiv zoom on my Z712. It's one of my few disappointments, but I can live with it. It's an almost unnoticable darkening inthe four corners, which means that panoramas look terrible in the sky, unless you overlap so much at both ends and for each shot that that bit isn't used. I can live with that as well. I had begun to think, but not very hard,about a wide-angle adapter. I don't do a lot of architecture and it would cost me a large fraction of the purchase price of the camera, and I'm not bad at vertical panoramas.

Alan T

I just reviewed some of my pictures (from which I upload the airshow pictures here last June) and I can't discern any vignetting at full telephoto (70.72 actual - 420 equiv.) My Z612 definitely vignettes at 5.85 actual - 35 equiv. with the upper left corner most noticeable but some some evident on the upper right and lower left corners. By 7.6mm actual 45mm equiv. it's gone except for upper left. By 11.7 actual - 70mm equiv. the vignetting seems to be gone.

Lens, as opposed to adapter, vignetting is at least somewhat reduced by stopping the lens down and almost all of these airshow photos were at f5.6. This may explain some of the difference between your Z712 observations and my Z612 observations. The other factor that may be influencing the vignetting is a size/geometry difference between the 6MP sensor on my camera and the 7/8MP sensor on the 712/812. The equiv focal for that lens is 35-420 on the 612 and 36-432 on the 712/812 suggesting some size/geometry difference.

Of course Deltasac can't see most of the vignetting that we're talking about because he has the tele adapter in place.

A. C.

[Double M]

I have 2 things to say regarding audio quality on the Z812 IS:

1) There was a recent firmware upgrade that apparently improves HD recording quality.

2) The HD recording quality audio is only 16000 KhZ. You probably know this but CD quality is between 44000 and 48000 so they obviously didn't design this photo and video camera with high quality audio in mind but this may have been improved with the new firmware codec.

[slade]

How do you play the HD recordings on your PC?