Pentax 750z - Movie Mode - Problem

I suspect the same problem: A slow PC processor video card that is incapable of refreshing at 30 fps that many pixels. Often if I have other things running on my PC at the same time as I view video (running 2500 Athlon XP) it will be jerky, lines, etc. But is I shut all other applications down (you would be surprised how much processing can be taken up by real time virus checking programs) it works great. Actually the only video I have seen that exceeds the Pentax 750Z is the much older Canon Powershot S1. That camera with only 3 megapixels produces superb movies and with the 10X lens and an add on 2x converter it still does a great job up to about 50X while using about 2.5x digital along with the full 20X optical. It's darn nearly a camcorder! But the Pentax is not far behind. Too bad you can't add an accessory lenses!

FedEx just dropped off my 750z a few hours ago(!), so I have only had a short time to play around with it. I did try 1 quick video at 640/30fps, and I did not see anything like what you described (perhaps you could grab a jpeg frame from the vid and post it here so we could see?) My only thought is: What is the speed of the PC that you are playing the vid on? It has been my experince that the MotionJPG encoding that cameras use, while fast for capturing the video can be a dog when it comes to playback. I suggest you either try playing the video on a fast PC (if, in fact, yours is not), or try re-encoding the vid with a more efficient codec. (for that you'll need quicktime pro, or a similar program such as RAD Video Tools which is freeware)