Kodak PlayTouch Camcorder Review

Using the PlayTouch

With such simple controls, the PlayTouch is easy to use. The screen is bright and functions fairly well in bright sunlight. The screen has a helpful anti-glare coating. As a touchscreen, it accepts the typical gestures including tap, tap and hold, swipe, and drag. Most of the time, the touchscreen was responsive, but we had a few instances where it froze and refused to respond.

The basic touchscreen controls can be quickly mastered, making the PlayTouch easy to use.

The screen is optimized for reviewing videos in landscape mode. When you playback videos, they fill the whole screen and look quite good.

When recording videos, however, only a small portion of the screen shows what you are recording. The rest of the screen is used for controls, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9: The recording screen

Videos can be recorded in 720p at 30 and 60 frames per second or at 1080p at 30 frames per second. There is also a macro mode available from the slider on the top of the device. The videos are clear, crisp, and smooth if you use a tripod or have a very steady hand. Although the camera has built-in image stabilization, we found it didn’t fully compensate for our slightly shaky hands.

Videos taken at 720p were crisp and clear, but 1080p videos were slightly jagged with artifacts appearing occasionally. All the automatic functions worked well, except the white balance, which we would have liked to have been
able to adjust. Unfortunately, we didn’t find a way to do so.

When we started taking videos, we began to notice the inferior build quality of this device. The front and back of the device seemed to shift slightly when in use. This was very evident when pressing on the touchscreen. When we tried to zoom in and out by pressing the screen while taking a video, the device actually made a squeaking sound as the front and back of the device rubbed together.

Although the videos we recorded were good, the squeaking was noticeable during playback, completely ruining the audio. We also noticed that the audio from the built-in microphone was stronger on one side of the camera than on the other.

This is, however, one of the few pocket cams that we’ve seen that can accept an external microphone, and the PlayTouch worked well with all the external microphones we tried. The only problem was that since the jack is on the top of the PlayTouch, when using an external microphone, it’s difficult to keep the microphone cable out of the picture. The PlayTouch records in mono AAC with the built-in microphone and in stereo AAC with the microphone jack.

The MP4 videos we took worked well with all the video editing software we tried. You can also trim shots and extract stills right from the camera (in JPEG format). Video effects like black-and-white and sepia are also available in the camera. This camera has EasyShare functionality that lets you choose photos and videos to automatically upload to YouTube, Facebook, or email when you connect to the Internet.

The included HDMI cable is a plus, and if you take a lot of family videos, the ability to show them on a television is great, but the videos showed compression artifacts when viewed on a large screen.

Also, you can put a headphone on the microphone jack to listen to your videos in stereo.