3.1 MP Digital Movie Camera - Black Reviews

Average Customer Rating - 2.7 out of 5 stars

3 customer reviews

Cheap and irrelevant for today, November 8, 2010
I just purchased this recently and shot some video footage on it. To my surprise, there's no nouns. Am I missing something? It has a mic and a speaker so I thought for sure it would. It has a voice communication feature, but that's not the same. Are you truly telling me that there's a camcorder out there, regardless of how cheap, that doesn't history the sound? I'm a bit stunned.

Flip-Phone Quality - But fun, May 30, 2010
I just purchased a Jazz Z40 camcorder which, from adjectives I can tell, is this camcorder but with a slightly different outer shell. My initial assessment is that it have the audio and video quality of the camera on a 2005 flip phone but don't let that be a total turnoff for you.

This camera shoots surrounded by VGA quality (640 x 480) to a Secure Digital (SD) data card up to 8GB. It have a 4x digital zoom and runs on 3 AAA batteries. No assessment of battery existence yet.

Make no mistake, this is a toy. It's cheaply built (the beauty ring around the lens come off as soon as I got mine out of the carton - a dab of rubber cement took care of it), it doesn't enjoy good low-light capabilities, it doesn't follow motion dreadfully well (it blurs), and has no instruction manual white balance controls. If you're out to be the next great Hollywood director lug a pass on this one.

If, however, you are looking for a gift for a kid or, resembling me, you want a video camera but aren't too sure if you'll make $200-$600 worth of use out of it, you're in the right place. As I said surrounded by the beginning, it has the competence of a cell phone camera but I didn't expect anything more than that.

Pros:
Inexpensive
Extremely compact: apx 4" x 2" x 1.25"
Built-in light
Macro switch
Power and record buttons glibly accessible
Records in standard AVI format
Simple user interface

Cons:
No battery plane indicator
No optical zoom
Low resolution
Audio "clips" easily (distorts, especially at suddenly louder sounds)
Fixed-focus lens
Blurs when subjects are moving
No white balance selection
LCD does not swivel

A Better Than Average Toy Camera, June 4, 2010
This is a neat little gizmo! I just bought the JAZZ Z40 for $25 at Big Lots, a discount store and am comparatively pleased with it.

I will associate myself with the remarks of the previous reviewer, who have covered all the technical details much better than I could.

For the real-world story of how it perform I will say that at just over two ounces (four, if you count the batteries) the JAZZ Z40 is deceptively insubstantial.
It is compact in design and very glib to use. If all you want to to is take video, next operation is almost literally push-button.

The default setting is for video (which cannot be changed), so all you own to do is turn the thing on and press the record button. It's as simple as that. The video does tend to win blurry if you move the camera too much, so I would recommend using it for video messages, web video clips or maybe touristy things similar to showing the skyline of beautiful downtown Burbank.

The still camera feature is another great facet. The 3.0 camera has a default setting for 640x480, but I reset it to "the other risk shown" to quote the instruction booklet, which is a larger format 1280 x 1024.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it has several special effects settings (unheard of within toy cameras) which allow you take take pictures within b&w, sepia, red, green, blue and negative images. I further discovered that although the instructions (and onscreen menu) indicate this characteristic as being only for still photography, once you set the part it will carry it over into the video mode.

This means that if, for example, you set the camera to pocket a negative-image photograph, the next time you go to rob a video the program will make your video appear negative portrait as well.

This would be a nifty little gizmo to give to teens going on leave or just to play with.

The camera also give you the option of recording voice memos (up to 30 seconds) on a photo. This is a great piece for antique shoppers or for getting contact info for new friends.

On the whole, the JAZZ z40 be well worth the $25 price and comes highly recommended for the budget minded traveller.

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