The Surprisingly Thoughtful Design of a Cheap Camcorder
EETimes's article on the creation of the Flip Ultra video camera by Pure Digital is a great example of how learning the thought and care that goes into a product can change your mind. Or my mind, at least, having ignored the Flip Ultra as a piece of knocked-together mass market exploitation but now finding myself questioning if perhaps I wouldn't be just as happy with a little pocket-sized, all-in-one solid state camcorder instead of my fairly expensive and unpocketable HD camcorder.To address the ease of use issue, the designers rallied around a theme: No extra buttons. "The user would always know what each button does," said Fleming. In fact, the team had a goal that within 30 seconds, the user should know how to use it. "It must be intuitive or we won't use it," he said....
The "Eureka" moment came with the development of proprietary damping algorithms to implement a non-linear response curve off stasis to give a smooth 'landing' quickly, without instability in the system. "For slow or little change, we keep the auto exposure stable or make very small changes which cannot easily be discerned by viewers," said Furlan. While the auto exposure has no impact on the underlying video frame rate, it does improve the perception that as the camera moves from one scene to the next, there were no significant jumps in brightness.
Under the Hood: Flip Ultra camcorder - An ode to clean design [EETimes.com via Core77]
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While the design is certainly cool, the picture quality on the Flip camera I tried out was absolutely abysmal. It might be "VGA quality", but resolution isn't the whole story. The images it produced were blocky and VERY noisy.
If they'd put a better lens and sensor into it (even if they charged a little more), I might consider it.
it's more of a Youtube camera than one built for tv
I'm always irritated by the "button minimalist" design school. It implies a "we know what is good for you" position when applied to high tech gear. The problem is that tech gear is highly flexible and is often used for purposes which they were never anticipated. In my opinion the best approach is to incorporate a "simple mode" with straighforward buttons coupled with an "advanced mode" accessed by navigation keys and a well designed menu.
Adam, were you using the Ultra or the original Flip? I ask because the sample video on the Flip website looks pretty darn good.
If you really want something like this, CVS offers(ed?) a "disposable" digital video camera for around $30. The theory was you'd take your 20 minutes of video, drop the camera off, and they'd burn it onto a DVD for $50. Instead, if you soldered in a USB cable and downloaded a driver, you could record multiple videos on the camera, and download them to your computer. It's simple to do, and made a good afternoon project. The next project for this camera is going to be an underwater housing...
SCUBA_SM: This camera is actually the same as the CVS camcorder. Both are made by Pure Digital, but the CVS camera uses a proprietary port (actually the same port as the Palm III PDA) and the movies are encrypted. However, from what I understand, the newer firmware on the CVS camcorders is much harder to crack.
Err, scratch that, the port is actually from the Palm m100.
Incidently, I have quite a bit of experience with these cameras, as I hacked a CVS camera to be the payload of an undergraduate experimental rocket project while in college. The camera worked flawlessly, but unfortunately the experimental parachute system didn't, and the camera was very dead by the time I dug it out of the three feet of dirt it had buried itself in.
ZAN,
I hacked one of them too. When they first came out, I bought one thinking "Better get one now, while they're still easy to hack." Of course, I haven't figured out what to take videos of now that I've got it. Maybe I'll strap it to an RC plane while I'm working on the UW housing.