Review: Kodak Playsport video camera

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Once a company synonymous with all things pertaining to still photography, Kodak has decided to glide through the winds of change by navigating its future on print solutions, affordable digital cameras and handheld video cameras. Their Kodak Playsport camera competes with every smartphone that shoots video as well as Cisco's successful Flip line of handheld cameras but Kodak's rugged, intuitive and waterproof shooter carves its own niche as the de facto camera for the sporty set.

The first thing we realized about the Kodak Playsport, which retails for $150 (Best Buy, Future Shop), is its impressive and truly solid build quality. Everything from the high quality rubber and plastic used as well as fit and finish screams military grade and, to cop a phrase from Ford, totally built-tough. This isn't the sort of fit and finish one expects to see in a sub-$200 video camera.

Aside from being tough as nails, virtually childproof and easy to handle, the Kodak Playsport is submersible of up to 10 ft in water, which makes it the only handheld video camera that can shoot HD video underwater at this price point. We're talking 1080p HD video plus a decent-enough 5-Megapixel 16:9 widescreen stills for those times a dedicated point-and-shoot isn't available.

We like the fact that Kodak designed this to be easy to carry, it has a small eyelet that's perfect for a lanyard or a carabiner which makes it easy to access. In terms of ease of use, just turn it on choose stills or video from the settings and it is good to go.

We took the Kodak Playsport to a press event at the Toronto Design Exchange and put together the short video above. YouTube compression and so-so lighting, you can see the camera's quality. Its just as good or even better than what we experienced with last year's Flip camera. 

Getting the video onto a PC is easy with Kodak's own Arcsoft Media Impression software although we imported SDCard into our MacBook Pro and cobbled together the above video with iMovie. Working with the camera is easy and we like the fact that the user decides how much memory they want on the device and that the SDCards offer removable storage, definitely a plus feature over the rival Flip cameras.

Specs include 4x digital zoom, 128 internal memory but expandable to 32GB via SDCard, a mono microphone and electronic image stabilization. Part beauty and part beast, the Playsport is one of this year's most delightful surprises in terms of price, ease-of-use and build quality.

Rating: 4 out of 5