Usage & Testing
There really isn’t much you have to do to get this camera up and running, just charge your batteries up and you are good to go. Shooting video is simple just point and hit the large center button to start recording. When you start recording there is a timer that starts that will show you how long your video is. Also when you zoom in and out there is a meter on the right side of the LCD. To let people know you are recording there is a small LED on the front of the camera that comes on.
There are actually 4 different shooting modes, to change modes before you start recording you can either hit the left or right control buttons. The modes are as follows, HD60: 720p at 60fps 16:9, HD 720p at 30fps 16:9, VGA 640 x 480 4:3, and picture mode. Yes this camcorder also takes photos at well at 3MP.
To review your videos you just hit the play button on the camera and you can watch the videos that you have taken. What is pretty cool is that you can sort through them 1 by 1, by thumbnails, or even by date.
Here is a short video that I took with the Zx1 on the HD60 mode. It has not been edited it all uploaded in raw format.
The video quality is really good and impressive for such a small device, although I did notice when watching the videos back on my computer there was a very annoying buzzing sound in the background of all the videos. It is not noticeable when there is a lot of sound in your video, but when there isn’t much sound you can really hear it and it is annoying. This is just not acceptable when it comes to a digital camcorder.
