Video camera image vs still camera video image

Here are a single image from a video still captured from my Kodak C875 camera vs the Flip Ultra Series video camera.  Hopefully I have done these fairly with justice to each camera.  The C875 video has to be processed in quicktime and saved as an H264 image to use with my video software, but I think that the image is not recompressed along the way.

Both are at 640×480 (click on images to see full size):

C875:

C875 Captured off Quicktime by FRAPS and saved to PNG

C875 Captured off Quicktime by FRAPS and saved to PNG

Flip ultra:

Flip video exported to png image

Flip video exported to png image

I think the Flip actually does a better job for use on the web, although it does have some visible compression artifacts. The image appears to be sharper.

Another key factor is that the Flip will capture up to 30 min of video with no intervention.  The C875 has an adjustable setting for up to 10 min of video prior to going into power saver mode.  The C875 saves to a SD card and can capture up more minutes of video in terms of capacity, but has to be turned back on every 10 min.  One fewer thing to keep up with during vehicle testing is better.  Both / either appear to work properly with Trackvision.

The C875 is tons better for still images.  My thinking now is use the Flip for in car video, and the C875 for session still shots on a tripod.

It appears that the DivX decoder puts up a DivX watermark into the video on some frames, as caught here.  Interesting.  This may have been an effect of cueing the video to the section I wanted and windows media.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.