Flip MinoHD Camcorder Review

It is great for kids, great for families, great for shooting and creating Internet Video.

If you or your business are looking for a quick and easy way to get video on the net, the Pure Digital Flip Video Mino HD Camcorder is the answer.

This is really cool. By using the online customization option, you can design and create a unique one of a kind camcorder. You can add personal designs, colors, patterns, etc. This maybe the best electronic gift ever! You can even use your personal photos to customize the cover of the Mino!

Pure Digital has made two big upgrades to the market leading Mino camcorder – they have added HD quality and have rolled out an improved software package for editing and sharing the videos.

Like the previous Pure Digital mini camcorders, the new MinoHD is very easy to use, quite compact and makes good looking video. With the upgrade to capturing High Definition video (HD 720p (1280 x 720, 16:9 widescreen), 30 fps (constant frame-rate), progressive scan – the video looks better than the previous version. In order to accommodate the higher bit rate (i.e. bigger files) Pure Digital has greatly increased the size of the flash memory to 4 gigabytes that allows you to capture about an hour of video and audio.

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HD Flip - In the Bedroom
Husband comes home to a birthday surprise. Featuring: Kelen Coleman Mark Gagliardi

In addition, for no additional cost, you can customize your MinoHD (or the older standard definition version). At the Flip Website, you can select what kind of design you want – you can get the standard cool black, or you can choose among a variety of pre-made case designs.

You can also design your own cover using their sophisticated pattern generator or you can use a photo from your personal collection. This is really cool. Family photos, faces, images - whatever.

Once you upload your selected picture, you can adjust and tweak the image a bit to make sure it fits onto the camcorder. This is so cool that I wanted to throw away my Black MinoHD review unit and buy a new one just so that I could personalize it.

The camcorder with its minimal controls is easy to use. Once you have turned it on using the small button on the side, pushing the red button in the middle activates record mode. Once you see Ready in the color view screen, just hit the red button again and you will be recording. A small red cue light on the front of the camcorder indicates to your subject the camcorder is indeed recording.

Press the button again to stop recording. Whenever you hit pause, the MinoHD displays how much time you have left for recording. That's very helpful to keep form running out of record space.

For playback, you can use the left and right arrow keys to select a video. Just hit the red button to play. If you want to erase a clip to free up recording space in memory, you use the trash can icon on the top right to activate erase mode. You can erase a single clip at a time or the entire memory.

The MinoHD is a totally automatic camcorder. There are no controls to pick from. The only recording option is the 2x digital zoom. Once you have started recording, you can use the plus and minus arrows above and below the red button to zoom in and out. Remember, this is digital zoom so all you are really doing is magnifying the pixels to make it look like you are zooming. For some reason, you cannot zoom in until recording has started.

The biggest challenge with using the MinoHD is audio. Pure Digital has mounted a sensitive omnidirectional microphone on the front of the camcorder that captures everything. If you are more than two or three feet away from your subject, you will also be capturing a wide range or environmental sounds and noises from behind and around your subjects. This means that for interview situations or where the sound is very important, you need to have the camcorder as close to your subject or subjects as possible.

This is not a camcorder designed for video editing or for any type of “professional” use. Even though it is billed as HD and does capture 920p resolution, remember the Mino captures its images using an inexpensive plastic video lens, and does not offer optical zoom or image stabilization. What you see is what you get. For a 200-buck camcorder that is tiny and easy to use, you get a very nice picture. It is a bit soft as a result of the powerful h.264 compression required to squeeze an hour of video onto less than 4 gigs of storage space. The color is slightly muted but not troublesome.

Like previous versions, the MinoHD camcorder uses a flip out USB connector arm that plugs directly into your Windows or Mac computer for re-charging the built-in batteries and for transferring the video for digital editing and sharing.

The MinoHD ships with cables so you can watch the video back on your TV. However, the included cables are standard RCA cables, not HDMI cables for optimum video performance.

Pure Digital Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder Review

The Best Electronic Gift for Kids and Families

by Mark Shapiro

January 15, 2009