Flip Mino HD

Pocket-sized video recorder

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, December 01 2009

Sometimes it’s the simplest of gadgets that give us the most pleasure – the Flip Mino HD is one of those devices.

It’s a pocket-sized high definition video recorder and … that’s all. There’s no phone, no music playback, no games, no built-in store, it does nothing but record high definition video (in stereo).

What it will do is give you a full hour’s worth of recording time on the built-in flash memory and then plug directly into your computer ready to upload directly to YouTube and/or archive the full HD video on your PC. The USB connector is located on the top of the device and at the push of a button it pops out of its hidden recess ready to go at a moment’s notice. The Flip Mino HD can also plug directly into your telly via a 2.5mm socket at its base and a supplied composite video and stereo audio cable.

A small colour LCD screen allows you to see what you’re recording and playback your video. Actually using the device is as simple as turning it on and pushing the single big red button on the front of it. Push it again to stop recording and you’re done.

Video quality is excellent, especially outdoors. Even inside in low light conditions it performed well, although with noticeably more noise in the images it produced. Even so, it’s all shot in glorious HD resolution and as such will still look better than most SD stuff. The digital zoom function is useful enough but will of course result in a degradation of video quality since all it’s doing is cropping the full HD picture in order to zoom in.

However, while the quality is great, it’s the simplicity and super-handy nature of the Flip Mino HD that makes it such a winner. Being able to carry it around in your pocket without a second thought means you can whip it out and start shooting whenever the need arises – in our experience it’s times like these when you capture the best footage (particularly if you have young children).

Similarly, being able to quickly and easily upload video direct to YouTube using the provided FlipShare software means you’re more likely to actually do something with the footage you shoot instead of leaving it in great big piles on your hard drive somewhere. The FlipShare program lets you do more than just YouTube, however, you can also email video from within the application, perform some basic editing and titling tasks and even create DVDs with menus to playback on you standalone DVD player.

There’s also a standard definition version, the Flip Mino, which costs $279, but we reckon the Mino HD is the only way to go. For a start, the price is very good and the output superb, but there’s also the fact that Apple’s new iPod Nano can shoot SD video for less money and more features. So $349 for an HD video camera you can keep in your pocket seems like a bargain to us. We can’t fault it.

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