Review: The Flip Cam Mino
Monday, September 1st, 2008
So I’ve been raving about the Flip Cam over on my personal blog along with some nifty videos of my travel so far, but I haven’t really talked about it much, so here comes my review.
I first found out about the Flip Cam from a Hack College video podcast and was immediately impressed. The best things about the Flip Cam are its size and ease of use. It’s about the size of a handphone and I’ve had it for almost a week and have not looked at the user manual once. You switch it on, press record and press stop. End of story. It’s so nice to have a no frills piece of equipment these days.
The one thing that I was a little bit hesitant about at first was the size of the lcd screen. You can see it’s pretty tiny, especially compared to what I’m used to on my 2.5inch Nikon D40x, 3inch Canon Ixus 860 IS and 3.5inch iPod Touch. However, with more use I’ve realised that the screen is meant for little more than making sure you have all the objects you want to capture in your view, because the Flip Cam’s video quality is so high that it takes care of the rest. In other words, as long as the object of interest can be seen on the lcd screen, even if it looks like an ant, you don’t have to worry.
Memory-wise, the Flip can hold an hour of video. At first I thought it didn’t sound like much, so I decided to keep all my videos on it and see how long before I run out of space. Fastforward a week later and I’ve barely used 10 minutes of video. Pretty amazing! That said, I don’t think you could go on a long trip without laptop to transfer stuff to because sooner or later you will probably run out of space.
The other thing that bugged me was the lack of batteries. The original Flip Video used AA batteries whereas the Mino uses an internal battery charged by your USB port. However, seeing as it’s unlikely I (or for that matter most bloggers) will go more than a week without connecting our gadgets to our laptops or computers, it’s safe to assume that the battery can be easily charged. And it only takes a couple of hours.
Brian also alerted me to the fact that the Mino has a omnidirectional mic attached compared to the older versions of the Flips. That means that it picks up sound from all direction, not just in front of the camera. That makes it great for interviews or running commentary as well (as you can see from my videos)
All in all, I think the Flip Cam is a fantastic piece of equipment. Sure my Canon Ixus 860 IS can take videos, but I’d much rather save the space for pictures, and use the Flip for dedicated video taking. It’s also much smaller which makes it easier to store in my pocket for quick retrieval. I think this is going to be a great accessory for the next Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, PodCamp Montreal and other fun stuff while I’m up here in Canada.
Until I can bring it home and show all of you in Singapore, you can check out my videos on Vimeo, where I’m now a proud member of the Flip Cam owners group!
Tags: canon ixus 860 is, conferences, flip cam mino, flip cam owners group, hack college, ipod touch, nikon d40x, podcamp montreal, social media breakfast singapore, travel, video recording, vimeo
