What’s great about the latest model of the Pure Digital’s pocket video cameras isn’t what they can do today—this latest “Flip Video Ultra” can shoot up to an hour of video on its 2GB of internal flash memory—but what they’ll be able to do in a year or two when they’ll be in the discount bin: still take decent video with a device that you don’t mind losing.
In the meantime, if you’ve got $180 to spend on a camera, get one that takes miniDV tapes. It might be larger, but the quality will be better; failing that, you’ll be able to record for more than an hour at a time. It likely will not be pink and white, mind you.
Pure Digital Technologies introduces new Flip Video Ultra series [Crave.CNET.com]
Incidentally, you can take one of those disposable cameras and solder a USB cable/port into it. Install the driver, and presto: a video camera for around $20. It doesn’t have whole lot of memory, but I don’t usually shoot hour-long epics. I’m working on building an underwater housing for mine.
I’ve just bought the older flip video 1 hr for just about $100, and I couldn’t be more thrilled – I think you’re right, though, that this will be better when the price has gone down.
The video is way better than it has any right to be for the price, and what I like about it opposed to miniDV is that if I shoot 10 minutes of video it doesn’t take 10 minutes to import it, it just takes whatever time is required to transcode it to h.264 (because, unfortunately, the codec it records in is not compatible with imovie).
Check out this article
Video for Everyman
By CHRISTOPHER LAWTON
September 26, 2007
Wall Street Journal Online
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119076444203939332.html
or my see my post here:
http://paulinobrener.blogspot.com/2007/09/video-for-everyman.html
Actually it looks suspiciously close to the “disposable” video cameras presently available for $20, short of the USB port.
It would be interesting if somebody would target near disposable price video and camera systems with USB integrated and make their money on volume and web tie-ins
Monopole: You’re right – PureDigital is the company behind both this camera and the disposable ones. They’ve got 90% the same guts inside (at least the non-ultra flip; I haven’t looked at this one yet) — they added more memory, the usb connector, and, of course, unlocked it.
Don’t forget your Canadian friends!
After a year we can order directly from the website.
http://ca.theflip.com
Looks like it’s already down to $118 on Amazon.
MR