I recently purchased Kodak's SPZ1 camera as a waterproof and shockproof alternative to iPhone. I made few test videos and my conclusion is that the camera is mostly unusable due to the poor video quality that is a result of some poor choices in firmware settings (that cannot be adjusted by the user). The overall video quality (sharpness, colours, etc) is noticeably worse than iPhone's. I recorded the video in the same conditions using iPhone 4S and SPZ1 and noticed that the output video file is compressed by SPZ1 with really low bitrate. SPZ1 records a file at 10mbps, while iPhone does 21mbps in the same conditions, with the same resolution and framerate. 10mbps is way too low for the HD video.

The Fujitsu DSP chip that SPZ1 uses is normally capable of a wide range of output bitrates, including the higher ones. The bitrate could have been increased (and video quality improved) by simply releasing a new version of firmware, that utilizes the chip to its fuller capacity. On a positive side, SPZ1 is using H.264 High profile for the output video, whereas iPhone 4S uses just H.264 Baseline. My guess is that it's just the default setting in the Fujitsu chip and not a result of someone's good will.

Another note is about audio. SPZ has a great stereo microphone, but the audio stream is bundled uncompressed into a video stream, which means that of the 10mbps I mention above, 1.5mbps (15% of the total bitrate) is given to audio and only 8.5mbps to video. This is such a waste -- the same Fujitsu chip can easily compress audio as well. For comparison, iPhone 4S compresses the mono stream into AAC with 0.06mbps (0.3% of the total bitrate). This also could clearly have been made using another firmware settings, but it seems like Kodak does not care.

As a conclusion, I'm pretty sceptical about anything Kodak releases lately. They may understand hardware, but like Sony, their software choices are questionable.