First impressions

At first sight, the Flip seemed slightly more chunky than I had been hoping for, however it fits comfortably in the hand and I was able to carry it around in my trouser pocket for a whole day without it becoming annoying. My wife described the look of the unit as “retro”, this might be down to them fact that I have the orange version, but the no-nonsense plastic casing certainly doesn’t give the impression of a hi-tech piece of kit. The absence of black, chrome or brushed steel finish seems to me to almost encourage slipping it into a pocket and carrying it around all of the time.

Ease of use

Simplicity itself, I can’t think of anything that would make this camera easier to use. The fact that you can’t “Flip” the screen to see yourself when recording has been pointed out by others although it’s not too difficult to aim the camera for rough and ready shooting. One of the best features of the Flip is the fact that it’s ready to shoot within a couple of seconds of switching it on, it allows you to be very spontaneous and I found that after one day of playing with it, I’d shot over seventy snippets of video, many of them no longer than a few seconds.

The Flip out USB plug is one of the killer features of this camera, too often the hassle of transferring video from the camera to a computer and then uploading to a web site can be the barrier to publishing video. There are no leads required and you could plug this thing into just about any Mac or windows PC with an internet connection and publish using the onboard software.

Quality of recording

for an inexpensive camera, the quality of video and sound is surprisingly good. Given that the aim of the camera is to cater to the online video sharing generation, the quality is above what is currently used on YouTube. Vimeo does a much better job of representing the recorded quality. I’ve tried the camera out in various light level and although you wouldn’t pick it for low-light shooting, it handles dimly lit areas quite well.

Software

The software is quite basic although not without merit. You can easily preview, trim and save videos. There is also the option of transferring them back to your camera, useful if you have edited videos using another software package or to get a copy of somebody else’s footage.

The camera also includes a version of muvee video mixing software which can be used to automatically create movie montages using predefined styles and background music, you can also specify any mp3 file on your machine to use as a soundtrack. There is no scope for specifying what order to show the videos in and editing the length of the video is down to trimming the videos and saving them before making the mix. It IS a nice way to compile a whole bunch of very short snippets into something more watchable.

Durability

Being a solid state recorder, there are no moving parts to worry about in the Flip. The casing of the camera seems very solid and the lens is well protected. I’ve had no qualms about letting my six-year-old daughter take the camera and try it out – it’s testament to the ease of use that I told her how to switch it on and she figured the rest out for herself.