Comments on: Zoom Q3 Mobile Video + Stereo Sound, Love Child of an H4 Recorder and a Flip

By: Esol Esek

Esol Esek — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:52:51 +0000

I returned a zoom H2 20 minutes after I received it for unbelievably cheap materials and a terrible interface. Hope this has got more heft to it, and a better interface as well. The H2 left a lot to be desired.

By: Steve Clark (steevc) 's status on Saturday, 18-Jul-09 20:38:03 UTC - Identi.ca

Steve Clark (steevc) 's status on Saturday, 18-Jul-09 20:38:03 UTC - Identi.ca — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:33:41 +0000

[...] http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/07/17/zoom-q3-mobile-video-stereo-sound-love-child-of-an-h4-reco... [...]

By: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:37:43 +0000

don’t forget the Creative Vado HD. I am using and love it.

By: urbster1

urbster1 — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:53:20 +0000

If you didn’t have a field recorder and picked this up because of the great audio quality, and say you’re in the woods and don’t particularly want to waste tons of space recording video but just want the audio of ambient nature sounds, does it do audio-only recording?

By: In The Market

In The Market — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:52:22 +0000

Thank God this was announced. I was a day or two away from buying an ZoomH2, now I’ll have to rethink my options. I Wonder how durable it in comparison…

By: Torley

Torley — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:51:37 +0000

Fascinating — and hopefully this will be successful enough to lead to future generations with HD, which becomes increasingly consumerized. I had a Flip MinoHD before returning it. Despite the resolution, the audio recording was very thin (lacked bass and presence) and the resulting MP4 files had many visible artifacts and rolling shutter. So at as-is 1280x720, they were lacking. Only after color correction and downsampling did they appear crisp to my satisfaction. This also comes in handy for visually documenting location recording. Via Designing Sound, I watched a couple videos where Richard Devine narrates his and Josh Kay's work for The Electronic Manuscript, and something like this may have been handy — even if Devine uses M-Audio portable recorders.

By: Vehical Driver

Vehical Driver — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:35:05 +0000

I would buy this thing tomorrow if it did 720p, let alone 1080p. I know people might think HD isn’t a big deal, but if you have a big TV low def looks really bad.

But yeah, I agree… Zoom is on a roll with cool and cheap products nowadays.

By: Darren Landrum

Darren Landrum — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:33:30 +0000

Okay, point taken. Another thing to keep in mind is that the next-gen Netbooks are right around the corner, with decent graphics chips and hopefully higher-resolution screens.

The other thing I wish this Zoom had were mics pointing back toward the person holding the camera. Then you could record interviews without swinging the camera around each time someone finishes speaking, hoping your getting the framing right. But hey, can’t have everything, right? May as well ask for a zoom lens and manual white balance.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:12:54 +0000

Well, right, but here’s the deal — often shooting at HD winds up being more forgiving when you scale down, it means you have a 16:9 aspect ratio, and you have the option of cropping. That said, sensor quality is still everything, and you might not want to shoot at HD if you’re also recording lossless audio. ;) So it does make some sense. Main thing really isn’t that detail so much as finding out what the footage quality is like!

By: Darren Landrum

Darren Landrum — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:11:52 +0000

Argh! I knew I was forgetting one more important point. Sorry, only one more post.

The other things to keep in mind is editability. HD requires some reasonable resources to edit efficiently. VGA resolution, though, like this thing does, can be edited on a small netbook which is almost as portable as this camera is. So not only can that traveling podcaster in the field shoot his or her footage, they can edit it, too, with inexpensive and easily toted gear.

Okay, I’m done with my what-should-have-been-a-blog-post now. :)