News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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There was a minor blip on the web a couple of weeks back but you may not have noticed it. David Pogue — Mac reviewer extraordinaire for The New York Times — reviewed a small video camera called the Flip. It's funny, the camera has been around for a while already, but it seems that since its release in May last year everybody missed it in some sort of HD-induced rage.
The easiest way to think of the Flip is as a digital camera that only takes those dinky web-style movies and doesn't take still photos at all. And so you ask the question, why wouldn't I just use a point-and-shoot digital camera instead? Well, because unlike a point-and-shoot camera, you don't need a manual. All you do to use the Flip is turn it on, start filming (by hitting the red button), and then, you guessed it, hit the red button when you're done. If you don't like that bit of footage you just captured hit the Trash button to delete it. And that's all there is to it. Literally. No mucking around with resolutions, white balance, focus, fade-ins or anything else that makes $1K-plus video cameras so complex.
The Flip captures video to internal memory (not expandable) so you'll need to choose the right size Flip for the job. The cheapest Flip, at $US119 can record for up to 30 minutes and has 512MB internal memory, and the largest has 1GB which is good for 60 minutes. There's also a newer model, called the Flip Video Ultra that comes in the same two sizes but improves on the video bitrate (2.8Mbps for the regular Flip, and 4.5Mbps for the Ultra). The 1GB Flip Ultra costs $US179.99.
You get your movies off the Flip by "flipping" up the internal USB adaptor, connecting to your computer and literally copying off the video files. The only software required is the installation of a special video codec so your Mac understands Flip's video format. Once off, the AVI files can be dropped in to iMovie, or you can use another bit of Mac software that Flip provides to re-arrange video, and upload to YouTube or AOL Video.
The Flip is relatively tiny (10.4cm x 5.7cm x 3.2cm) and, like point-and-shoot cameras, is small enough to fit in your pocket. So, if the Flip is really small, and really easy to use, what's the downside?
Well, first, unfortunately the Flip isn't available in Australia yet but can easily be purchased online in the US or through Target, Best Buy or Wal Mart — so you'll either need to get one while overseas, or ask a US comrade to go and buy you one.
Second, if you're a video aficionado you'll probably be a little disappointed with the quality of the 640x480 resolution that the Flip offers. And third, this probably isn't the camera you'll want to take away with you on a long holiday, because unless you take your computer too, 60 minutes of video just won't cut it.
But, if you are looking for a small video camera that's easy and fast to start using — and you can throw around a little bit — the Flip might just be perfect.
wrote on May 29, 2008 10:13 AM
Relevance? Last time I checked, you can't buy one in Australia, nor get one delivered to Australia from Amazon or Flip. I want one.
wrote on July 24, 2008 2:24 PM
You can buy them in Oz - details available here http://www.itmadesimple.com Great for kids, parents anyone really.
A young guy with this modification of John Lennon's famous "Imagine"printed in white on an Apple classic black T-shirt is high fiving hisfriends who have just produced "Lotus-eaters", a short music video warning of the dangers of unthinking submission to seductive technologies. They did this in less than 24 hours using the facilities of the new John Lennon Bus, being shown at Macworld Expo 2008 in San Francisco, after its re-launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in LasVegas earlier this month. (The concept has been in existence since 1998).
Martin Levins | Jan 17, 2008
I’ve done a fair bit of macro photography —- both in stills and video—- and, while the current crop of digital cameras promise amazing specs in the closeup department, most them fall down quite badly when the practical aspects are taken into account. For instance, the Ricoh Caplio GX100 is quite a nice camera and seems to promise the world inmacro shooting.
Barrie Smith | Jan 21, 2008
New owners of mobile phones revel in their clever and multiple abilities. It's not just a phone, it's also a GPS, and a web browser, and a music player, and ... sigh ... a camera. The big plus to taking shots with a phone camera is the "sneak factor". Very quietly, very slyly, you can take shots with your phone’s camera a lot more inconspicuously than using a digicam. Which brings in many issues relating to privacy and security and explains why some locations ban the use of mobile phones outright.
Barrie Smith | Feb 18, 2008
Now that the Blu-ray Disc versus HD-DVD stoush has been declared a non-starter (without the market ever really having much of a say in it) does that mean that the future of content delivery has been decided? Hardly. Battles are still raging on a number of fronts and few surrenders are to be found. Concessions, however, are many. For example, 20th Century Fox has released a number of DVDs in the USA which include "digital copies" of the main content. This may seem an odd sort of terminology since the DVD itself is a digital copy. But the emphasis in that terminology should be not on the word "digital" but on the word "copy". The "digital copy" is a version of the film optimised for use on devices like Apple TV and iPod touch. I specify those devices because, in the case of Fox at least, the copy is still protected by Apple's FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology, just as if it had been downloaded from the iTunes Store. Which means it won't play on any non-Apple devices.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 22, 2008
