Ok, so I bought this little beast about three months ago on ebay.uk. It was 150 quid and here are the three months later impressions :
The battery lasts for two hours (but you can use two regular AA batteries as a spare) and they only charge through USB. I tried using the iphone charger from the outlet that converts the outlet power to usb power for the FLIP HD ULTRA, but it didn’t charge. Didn’t break it either in case you’re wondering. It only charges through a computer USB and it takes about three hours for a full charge.
The video quality :
You can see the overall quality in the video below, but a few things need to be said.
It records 1280×720 HD footage. This is NOT the fullHD, it’s one of the lower high definitions but it looks amazingly well on your computer.
It is small and lightweight, easily to carry in the pocket as it is about pocket size, something like cellphones from about 5 years ago. Thus it’s good for “on the spot” recording. The great thing about it that it only takes 2 seconds from pushing the ON button to actually recording something so you can be quick. It’ll probably take you more time to take it out of the pocket than to turn it on and record. That’s impressive!
There are some drawbacks – it only records mp4 footage, so you’d have to convert it to something more usable like MOV for the MAC and AVI for WINDOWS.
There’s two hours worth of recording on the built in 8gb memory, and it’s not expandable in any way so you’d have to stick with what’s inside. No SD card slots or anything.
The 2x digital zoom is not really a good thing, as it only blows up the image, but at the cost of resolution. You can do that in any video editing software afterwards without spoiling the original file.
Biggest flaw in my oppinion ? Lack of an image stabilization technology, when the camera is fairly still it produces great quality videos. But when you move around with it (god forbid walking with it) the image get’s all shaky and it’s hard to focus on what you see. It’s more clear in the video.
Oh and it DOES NOT take still images, so it cannot be used as a photo camera – sorry. But why should it? The more all-in-one you get, the lesser the quality of each of the functions.
It does a surprisingly good job at night for a camera this size and price. Watch the video later and see for yourself. Sure there’s grain in the video but what did you expect? It’s not bad, pretty clear and pretty HD anyway. I recommend this piece of gear to anyone that needs just a point-and-shoot video recording without settling for 640×480. Sure 1280×720 is not fullHD but it’s HD enough for most users.
Test video (daylight and night time shooting in London):
Watch it in HD!!
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