u/AtmanRising

Hurricane Marie in the Pacific has brought much-needed rain to Southern California.

The Kodak Zi8 -- launched in 2009 -- was a little trooper in the rain. No way I'd have used some of our more expensive/rare camcorders!

Interestingly enough, YouTube Create doesn't like the MOV files output by this pocket camcorder. I had to convert them to edit-friendly ProRes (MOV) inside Kdenlive before editing. By then, I might as well just use Kdenlive for the whole thing.

Photos and videos shot at Edgemar in Santa Monica, all in portrait mode with few exceptions. The camera itself is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P41 built in 2004 in Japan.

Edited and cropped every still in Shotwell (Linux). The video was made in Kdenlive then upscaled to 9:16 1080p.

More about Edgemar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgemar

Make sure to check out my other digicam and vintage camcorder content on Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok :)

We recently inherited this mint Canon VIXIA HF G20, an excellent full HD camcorder from 2013. It can't do 1080p/60, but 1080p/30 is possible albeit with a compromised format. The same goes for 1080p/24, but amazingly this Canon also has a pure Cinema mode that actually delivers 24 frames per second!

YT link in case the Reddit player can't handle 24p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZXRhCbydXw

This is as "film-like" (in terms of cadence) as it goes for consumer CMOS camcorders. Perfect 24 fps. Color was set to Vivid, so it basically looks like real life from my POV. I heard some feature films were shot on it, and I believe it -- it has 32GB of built-in Flash storage, good for almost 3 hours at 24 Mbit (max quality) and support for 2 SD card slots, including the abilitiy to start on built-in memory, then seamlessly switch to the two cards in sequence. It can even record to both cards at the same time, so if one fails you still have a backup.

This HF G20 has more pro features than our 4K Panasonic. It's as good as it gets if you don't need 1080p/60.

Hope you enjoy the footage!

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P.S. There's a lot more test footage in this playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrWy8cuP4vv-_ycGJI-UawlXCtvlduz4I

The Canon Powershot SD550 Digital Elph is a 7.1 megapixel digicam that is universally beloved. Photos still look amazing to this day. The video quality is fun too, thanks to the good optics and full VGA resolution -- 640x480, which is naturally 4:3.

Keeping subjects in focus is a challenge. The only semi-reliable way is to choose between infinity versus macro mode before each shot. That's why some of this test footage is a little fuzzy. I didn't touch the colors, brightness, or contrast of any of the footage -- thanks to the built-in Vivid movie mode :)

The SD550 and its younger sibling -- the SD1000 -- are sought-after as traditional digicams, but you shouldn't ignore the video side of things. You can still have a lot of fun working around the limitations of this little "elph"!

Full quality on my YouTube channel:

https://youtu.be/XRKgFn1FRSw

A digicam is always fun to use, but you never know what you're going to get.

Yes, all of these photos were heavily edited. You can see noise, you can see artifacts... But there's something else. Something intangible.

The aging CCD sensor, 23 years later, simply refusing to die.

I'm serious. This thing was ahead of its time and I think Rocksteady learned from it to make Arkham Asylum.

Went to watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey on Dolby Cinema and decided to bring this little compact Sony with me.

Sit back, relax, and go back to the early 2000s with this nostalgic 4.1 megapixel digicam -- my favorite so far. Photos and videos were edited (Shotwell and Kdenlive). Video was upscaled to 1080p.