Since its inception, the Flip Video line of camcorders has been a regular feature around here at the Lab of D&PC. Earlier this year, they transformed the Flip Video into the Flip Video Mino. By streamlining the device with a lithium ion battery, and expanding the battery life to 4 hours, they took their little video camera and took it to the next level. For the last several months, whenever I hear folks discussing purchasing a video camera, I chime in for them to consider a Flip model as they are much easier to use, and equally important, much easier to upload and share the video through YouTube, not to mention affordable.
Not content to rest on their laurels, at the end of my Flip Video Mino review, I did ask for a few improvements, including an HD version, and more memory capacity. Well, the folks at Flip listened, and did make some changes to their latest product, the Flip MinoHD. Debuting just in time for this year’s Christmas season (careful to not say “holiday season” to upset Bill), the MinoHD keeps much of what works, and adds in some new features to the set. We’ll go through what they are offering this time around.
For starters, they kept the slim shape made possible by the lithium ion battery. It will fully charge via a USB port in 3 hours, which makes it convenient, and avoids the power brick situation that I can’t find an open outlet anywhere convenient. However, be aware that the battery life is down 2 hours, half of the original Mino due to the HD addition. For most folks, the shorter battery life should still be sufficient, but be aware it did get shortened back to what the original models offered with their AA batteries.
The size of 3.94″ x 1.97″ x 0.63,” and the weight of 3.3 oz, remains the same as the Flip Mino. With the streamlined size, it makes these video cameras able to fit into any shirt pocket or purse, and therefore easy to take just about anywhere and everywhere. While my larger digital camera often gets left home, I’ll choose to shoot video rather than still shots based on that the Flip will not weigh me down. The small size also makes this product suitable for use by children.
The optics remain similar with the new MinoHD. It is a fixed focus lens with a range of 1.5m to infinity. The lens is reasonably fast with a spec of f/2.4, which makes it ok for shooting low light situations. There is a 2x digital zoom, but I avoid using it because the video just gets larger and more pixelated. The video is viewed from the LCD on the back. Like most digital cameras these days, there is no optical viewfinder. There is the same LCD screen, 528×132 pixels on the rear as found on the original Mino. It’s plenty bright, and it can be used on a sunny day without difficulty. While it’s only 1.5″, I hope they resist the urge to make it larger as it gets the job done, and I wouldn’t want to see the battery life take the hit that inevitably would occur.
The real new feature of the MinoHD is that the resolution of the video has gone up- way up. With the trend for everything to be HD these days, it only makes sense for them to offer a camcorder that can deliver this. While the original Flip Videos, up until this point, offered a very standard def experience of 640×480, with an MPEG-4 compression scheme, the MinoHD offers more. How does 1280×720 sound? This offers a pixel count that is awfully close to a 720p HD television set. They’ve also changed the compression format to handle the data (9 Mbps, more than double before) and changed to the H.264 compression scheme.
As with previous Flip efforts, the software is cleverly built into the device. Just plugging in the MinoHD launches it, and the contained videos are all there for viewing. With a few mouse clicks, I managed to title the video and add a supplied soundtrack. The option to add an mp3 from my collection is also a well appreciated option. While it is simple enough for a first grader to do these types of basic video edits, anything more will require additional software (I personally like JumpCut, an online video service for editing video if you have a fast broadband connection). Be aware that running the software in the Flip MinoHD takes a little more processing power, with the recommended requirement being a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz chip, 512 megs of RAM in Windows XP (1 GB in Vista), and a USB 2.0 port. The software ran fine on my Athlon X2 5200+ system with 1 gig of RAM, and I’m confident that any dual core chip will get the job done.
So, what’s the downside here? Well, while the MinoHD can shoot the video in HD, it’s not so easy to view it. The output to the television remains a composite output and stereo cables for the audio. Any videophile will concur that a single yellow connector will never be able to carry hi def content to the TV. I suspect they’ll have to build a different connector into the subsequent model, but for now be aware that the video will not look much better when viewing on an HD set that the previous Mino. That’s really too bad as I suspect that most of the target audience of this device would want to watch it on their HDTV.
Even if we can’t gather round the TV, we can still watch the HD video we shot on our computer, right? Well…yes and no. When we load up the software, I was able to watch the video in its full HD glory on my 19″ monitor. It was in widescreen format, and in this situation, it was completely obvious that this was HD video with all kinds of detail. Unfortunately, be aware that this video eats up memory, and a clip just over a minute was over 100 megs. This accounts for why the 4 gigs of flash memory will store and hour of video. The “no” part comes in when it is time to upload the video to YouTube. As they are not quite yet supporting HD videos, the video when fully processed, did not look any better on the site than that shot with the Mino. I strongly suspect that YouTube and other flash video sites will support HD content in the near future, and in fact are already dabbling in it. However, it will probably not be fully deployed for at least a few months more. While I was able to find some YouTube videos in higher quality, the video I uploaded from the MinoHD was not in HD. Clearly expect some growing pains as YouTube becomes YouTubeHD.
Overall, I think the Flip Video MinoHD is a step up from the previous generation. While the video shot with the device is clearly improved, it’s too bad that it will only be seen on a computer screen, and not easily shared through the most popular video web sharing site, YouTube. The package includes a pouch style case, and retails for $229.99. below, you can see the sample video I shot and uploaded to YouTube. Stay tuned, as I suspect that the MinoHD is simply a product that got a little too far ahead of the technology curve, and needs the video sharing infrastucture to catch up.
Jonas
I was less than satisfied with the end of the review. I set out on a side project to figure out a way to share 720p video. After some googling, I figured out that one option is Blip.tv, a video sharing site that I already use to host my NudgeCast on. I uploaded it, and while the quality has dropped a few notches due to the reencoding process, it’s closer to what I see on my desktop than what YouTube is offering. Take a minute to view both videos below to see what I’m talkin’ about. While the Flip is set up to automatically upload to a YouTube account, it’s not a big deal to manually upload to an alternate such as Blip.tv.
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