Cool Cheap Camcorder

Last Sunday, I saw on Richard Wanderman’s blog a note about David Pogue’s review of the Flip Ultra. Last year I was contemplating getting an HD video camera to record our son’s first year and eventually his first steps. I spent a long time researching and thinking about it. I was about to purchase one, but decided against it as it isn’t all that convenient to use any camcorder.

When I saw the Flip Ultra, I said cool. The resolution, 640×480 is four times the resolution of the video clips on our digital camera, so what did I have to lose in getting one. I ordered on Sunday from Amazon for about $142 and received it yesterday. It is so easy to use, it’s unbelievable. I’ve only taken a few clips with it, but I can see us using it a lot and hopefully we’ll always have it handy to record our son.

The only downside I see right now is that it uses the 3ivx codec. Why is that a problem? Well, if you want to playback the video, you have to install the codec and if we want to post video online, others have to also download the codec which isn’t all that easy for novices. However, since I have QuickTime Pro, I can export video to H.264 which pretty much everyone can view these days. (I realized today why they chose 3ivx; it has to do with money. The H.264 and AAC codecs could amount to several dollars per unit shipped and with the Flip Ultra costing $140, a few dollars can make a huge difference.)

I think that I’m going to be quite happy with this as the main purpose was to shoot better video than what our digital camera does and at the resolution it does, it easily meets that requirement.