Anyone own or have tried the Zoom Q3HD?

Mark Wein

Grand Poobah
Staff member
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Q3HD

I need to replace my Kodak Zi8...this seems like it might be cool for my videos and hopefully be a step up...apparently they've discontinued the Zi8 and I was planning on upgrading but I don't have the budget from anything particularly nice yet so this is something of an intermediate step that I hopefully can also continue to use for gigs and whatnot after we get a nicer camera for the studio....

 
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This isn't going to be helpful at all... :embarrassed:

Haven't used one myself, but I know a guy who bought some kind of portable Zoom video/audio recorder thing, and from his description of it, it sounds pretty much like the unit above. He'd only just got the thing and pissed about with it a bit, got someone to test film a part of one of his gigs... but he said he was mighty impressed with it, both the video and audio side of things. :shrug:
 
To continue not being helpful...

It's this guy who got one:


That was posted up 6 months ago, and when I spoke to him a month or two ago I think he'd only just got it. So most likely that wasn't filmed with the Zoom unit at all. It also doesn't in any way at all look "high def". :embarrassed:
 
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I have the regular Q3, and love it.
Image quality isn't very impressive on it, but supposedly it's a lot better on the hd version.
Sound quality is really good. :)

It's great for quick gig recording and capturing song ideas and such imo.
 
To continue not being helpful...

It's this guy who got one:


That was posted up 6 months ago, and when I spoke to him a month or two ago I think he'd only just got it. So most likely that wasn't filmed with the Zoom unit at all. It also doesn't in any way at all look "high def". :embarrassed:


I have the regular Q3, and love it.
Image quality isn't very impressive on it, but supposedly it's a lot better on the hd version.
Sound quality is really good. :)

It's great for quick gig recording and capturing song ideas and such imo.

hmmm. I need to do a little research....we have new video lessons to shoot this month...
 
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hmmm. I need to do a little research....we have new video lessons to shoot this month...

Fwiw mine performs well as long as the lighting's good (video is a bit grainy but other than that quite ok), it does suck in dark settings. :embarrassed:

As posted a thousand times before ( :embarrassed: ), this was filmed with the Q3. As you can tell the sound's good, even after youtube mangling it. :grin:

 
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Thats actually not too bad for my purposes. I'm assuming that the HD will look even better.

The only bummer is that I can't see the viewfinder if I'm doing a video lesson by myself..
 
OK...here is what I needed...it's a comparison between the camera I have now and the Zoom (and a shitty Sanyo):

 
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The other thing is that the Zoom as a line in, so I could theoretically submix a couple of LDC's using an external mixer and get a little more control over the audio...
 
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