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Spurred on by wild curiosity, and a general interest in silly things, I bought the Zoom Q8 camera a little while ago. My primary motivation was to buy something I could take with me traveling. I also kind of rationalized the purchase by telling myself I could use it as a back-up recorder, the sheer silliness of which becomes apparent the moment you hold the thing in your hands and contemplate trying to fit it in a sound bag.

Form factor aside, it records sound just as well as other Zoom products like the H4N and the H5. Perhaps my biggest pet peeve is that the stock XY mic capsule that it comes equipped with doesn't have any kind of shock mount like the XYH-5 capsule that the H5 comes equipped with. Handling noise is a problem if you hand-hold the camera. I dropped a couple extra bucks on a little gorilla pod arm to hold it from, and that solved the issue nicely.

There's more play than I'd like in the pivot-arm that connects the mic to the body, but other than that the build quality is totally on par for a device at this price point.

The camera is wild. It's got an f 2.0 / 16.6mm lens, which puts the FOV in GoPro territory. It has just enough digital zoom to crop out some of the lens distortion, but this degrades the quality of the image a little bit. It's happened in some of the footage that I've shot that the camera got stuck flickering between f-stops, which was obviously annoying. I cannot recommend the Q8 for any professional purpose.

All this said, it's far and away one of the most fun cameras I've ever used. It's great for traveling, and general lifestyle/home video shooting. It's great for capturing a moment at a party, or on a bar patio - situations where crafting an image isn't as important as just seeing and hearing everyone you're sharing that moment with. When I pass this thing around to my film buddies they all fall in love with it the moment they get their hands on it. Additionally, you can plug it in to you computer via USB and it becomes an excellent webcam.

That's my experience with it so far. Perhaps not the greatest investment, but absolutely worthwhile for any soundie look for a fun gadget to play with for personal shooting.

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