Flip Ultra and Creative Vado pocket camcorders
Mini cams for the YouTube generation
Review 2008 has been the year of the small, cheap gadget. Sadly, the standard bearers of the new breed of pocket video cams, the Flip Ultra and Creative's Vado, maybe be small but they're also overpriced.
Such are the similarities between these two devices it's almost beyond belief that they were developed in isolation, a bit like A Bug's Life and Antz.
The Flip: has a bright but small screen
Both devices record video at 640 x 480 and 30f/s, and output content as MPEG-4 .AVI files. Both have 2GB of storage holding an hour's worth of content at the top quality setting. Both have 3.5mm TV outputs, a standard camera mount screw, a built-in USB connector and near as darn it identical controls: a central button to stop/start recording, a surrounding navigation pad to zoom digitally - x2 on both devices - and move forward/back, and two separate buttons to play and delete files. Heck, both even have the lanyard eye and the on/off switches are in the same place!
Creative's Vado: decent screen, nice control layout
There's not much difference in their sizes, either. The Vado is 101 x 54mm, the Flip 105 x 55mm. Due to its removable batteries, the 24mm-thick Flip is decidedly more chunky than the 15mm Vado and heavier too: a battery less 97g to the Vado's 84g all up.
COMMENTS
re: ? Maybe, but many cameras for the same price do it much, much better.
Such as? Would be nice to have some recommendations.
Vado better?
Was that video taken with the latest vado firmware? I saw a video on youtube taken with the latest vado firmware the color is richer. Considering the price and screen size (bigger is better to look at), I think I shall go for the vado.
background interferences
"...background interferences like wind, dogs, small children, Americans, etc."
Ho ho ho :)
Mono?
Seriously in a portable device you need stereo sound so you can hear anything even indoors. Just try out closing one of your ears while listening to something, you will find out that with 2 ears you can hear a _lot_ better. And ADPCM, come on you can't have _that_ little DSP time left.
Hmmmm....
Wasn't very impressed with the video samples - they seemed quite lossy.
I'll stick with my Sanyo Xacti CA65. Easy to use - plenty of features, is waterproof, has generally good quality video and is also a quite respectable stills camera. OK, it costs more, but as someone's already said, you get what you pay for.
M.
