Analogism

Late last week I picked up the Aiptek PocketDV AHD Z500 PLUS by impulse. Not sure why, but it looked so shiny. The price was only 1′995 SEK (about $245 right now) I figured, a tiny camcorder like that, full HD 1080p… What if…? What if it’s actually decent. Boy was I wrong.

Unfortunately, my schedule was shifted around, so my plans to have some photos of it, videos and pictures taken with it before I returned it, fell through. But I figured I’d at least share my experience in words.

The first thing I did was to try and use it as a webcam. I failed. This is a USB camcorder, it has no Firewire, so it was not detected as a camera by neither Mac OS x nor Windows XP. I’m no video wiz, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect or how to go about this, but man did I fail. I tried everything, every software out there. Fail.

So eventually I started trying out the camera as it’s intended to be used. I shot some videos. For storage I used the SanDisk Extreme III SDHC Card which did its job well. But the camera… not so well.

I started to shoot some video inside my well lit office, imported it and had a look. The quality was what you would expect for this low budget camera I suppose, which was not well at all. Very grainy video, and there was a very annoying noise, a constant static disturbance in the audio, which was a little surprising. I did expect poor video quality, but not audio as bad as this.

Just for fun, I tried walking outside, beautiful winterland Sweden. Since it was past 2.30 PM it was pitch black (I know, disturbing huh?) and I turned on night mode. Hah! Night mode my ass. All you could hear were my steps crunching snow, and a solid black picture. I walked over to a street light, and it merely showed up as a small dot in the picture.

Since my schedule was thrown over, I never did get a chance to try it outside in daylight, but I’d expect it would be a decent video. However, with the poor audio, I wouldn’t really approve anyway. To Aiptek’s defence, I never checked out any settings for the audio, maybe there is some sort of compression/normalization feature, but I doubt it.

Conclusion: Uh-uh. No thank you sir.

Update: Here are two short clips shot in daylight by Jan Persson (in beautiful summerland Sweden). Looks fine. Hear the audio though? I know it’s outside, but it’s very noisy…

Aiptek z500 hd from Jan Persson on Vimeo.

Aiptek z500 from Jan Persson on Vimeo.