The Flip

Greetings faithful blog readers. You may recall back before Christmas me doing a camcorder review. At the time we had bought the Sony Xacti. It did have some cool features, but the video quality and audio were not as good as i had hoped. The main reason we do not have the camera anymore was a defect in the one we had. It had some dirt or something down in the lense that would show on the video. So we sent it back and have been without... until now that is. Sam has been asking for a camera for a couple months to get clips of the girls. So i started researching cameras, the ones i really like are like a 1000 bucks and that is not in the budget. My criteria were as follows. (in no particular order)

- Small, easy to use
- Some type of flash memory so footage can be pulled of in non real time
- Mac compatible
- Cheaper the better
- Easy to take and blog, email, etc the footage.

Take those criteria, and search for yourself. There isn't much out there. there are lots of "potentials" but they all fall short in some manner. My final selection after much thought was "The Flip". So far i am totally amazed at this camera. To say its easy to use, is really an under statement. What about flash memory? Yeap it will record 1 hour of footage. Easy to pull off? Absolutely. It even has the usb plug built in. You just copy it to your computer. None of this tape garbage of having to pull it off in real time, that drives me crazy. The biggie, the price. the total for this little guy was $149 bucks. In the world of video cameras, that is basically free. It runs on 2 AA batteries, and can easily fit in your pocket or purse. Sure there are video cameras that will do better quality, but most at the sacrifice of convenience of use or size. This little puppy is so easy to use, i feel certain that many more "first moments" that happen here every day will make they way into the archives of heady home movies. Ultimately that is the goal of this camera. So far it is off to a good start. Below is a sample of a clip we took. The quality is good, but keep in mind this clip has been crunched into web format so you will see some pixelization that isn't there in the full quality version. The picture to the right is a saved frame from the original video. Gives you a little better idea of the quality.