Tech Reaction

For some of us lucky Canadians, we were a part of the famous Pepsi Flip Your Smile; basically, they were handing out a free Flip Camcorder every hour for a month. Some people went on to win five or more just to resell, but I digress. This was advertised as a portable, hand held camcorder that could be used in pretty much any situation. Well, let’s take a look shall we?

The Flip HD comes in a very efficient looking box. I don’t know how a box looks efficient, it just does. It’s lightweight and pretty sturdy. Nevermind the fact that I mangled it a bit. The contents of that box is rather simplistic; another box! I didn’t bother getting a picture of that because it’s… another box. And that picture right up there is good enough. Anyways, in that box holds the manual (in several languages, hooray), RCA plugs (Red, Yellow, White) to view and listen to the videos, a cloth carrying bag, a wrist strap, and the actual camcorder.

The Flip MinoHD, as you can see, uses a touch interface for their buttons. Sort of hard to see at this picture, so I’ll explain that a bit later. There’s a miniature screen for viewing what you’re filming. There are also miniature speakers for recording/playing sound to the left and right of the screen. The wrist strap attaches easily enough, and is very convenient for it’s purpose; filming something on the spot, and without dropping the camera. Some technical information: this carries 2GB of memory (1 hour of video), and the battery lasts for quite a while, though it’s roughly an hour or so.

The Flip MinoHD is very stylish; it’s matte black. Or onyx black. Or midnight black. Just imagine a fancy adjective to place alongside the colour black. As you can see, the lens is a bit large, and VERY easy to get dust onto if you leave it hanging around precariously. Fear not! It can be wiped off most of the time. Get it scratched, and you may have a larger problem on your hands.

The cloth carrying bag I mentioned earlier is shown at the above picture. As you can or cannot see, it attracts dust. A lot of it. It’s also easy to lose and gets filthy just as easily. My advice? Find something better. This thing will keep the Flip relatively clean from general dust, (which you can wipe off with toilet paper or a cleaning cloth) but it’s still very susceptible to scratches and damage even though it’s in the bag. Plus, as something that you should be using in the spur of the moment, you don’t want to be fumbling around to get the bag open. It’s a rather unnecessary item because of that.

The Flip MinoHD, when turned on, has fancy LED lights to brighten up the buttons! As mentioned before, these buttons are touch sensitive, so it’s easy to accidentally hit something to the right or left of the one you’re trying to press. On the interface, you can immediately start filming by jabbing the big red button. Actually, to turn the thing on, there’s a very difficult to press power button on the side. You can also delete videos if you want with a notoriously easy to hit garbage button at the top right of the red button. Hmph.

You might be wondering how this thing gets energy. Simple; USB! As shown on the previous picture, there’s a retractable switch for a USB stick to pop out, and with that you plug it into any powered USB slot in a computer. Don’t have a USB slot? No power for you! (Well, you could always head to a local library)

Quality wise, you might be fooled by what’s displayed on the screen while filming. When you get the video posted or viewed on a larger screen, it turns out much nicer due to HD quality. Hooray!

Would I recommend the Flip MinoHD Camcorder? Consider this: Do you have a phone with a camera? Does it record sound? Do you carry it around with you all the time? Do you know how to access it? If you answered yes to the first four questions, then I wouldn’t recommend getting this over a phone’s camera, though it makes a great gadget gift. However, if you didn’t, then this could be useful if you can find it on sale as a very, VERY portable camcorder.