Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Flip Mino HD Review

Flip Mino HD – $179.99

Last summer, MyBlogSpark sent me a Flip Mino HD to record my first v-log with. Since then, the Flip has become an invaluable tool that I have used countless times – so I wanted to take a moment and tell you about my experience with it, because I think this would be an excellent holiday gift that the whole family could benefit from.

Before I got the Flip Mino HD, I wasn’t really interested in having a dedicated camcorder. I didn’t think it was something I would really use, and I figured if I really wanted to film something, I could always use our digital camera’s movie function. I mean, how often do I even take movies?

But as soon as the Flip arrived, it seemed like I was using it constantly! It’s small and totally portable, which means I can slide it into my tiny, overstuffed purse with no problem. It turns on in seconds, making it easy to capture interesting things before it’s too late. I’ve grabbed it to record footage of funny things (Like a frog hopping through our house), family events (Like birthdays), and I use it on a very frequent basis to record v-logs. I used it to record concert footage during the Goonies Rock Concert, and we’re using it every week to film our videos for the Love Story online reality show! This is also the same camera that I used to record the video that won me $10,000 – so yeah, I’d say it’s been extraordinarily useful to me!

And the quality is amazing. The videos are just beautiful – YouTube doesn’t do it justice, since the files which the Flip outputs are such high quality. I was blown away by how crisp, clear, and detailed the footage is; you can see items in the distance that would be a blurry blob on a camera. In fact, the picture is so good that I’ve used stills from the camcorder in the place of photos for a few blog posts when the digital camera’s batteries were low. The Flip also has a lot of memory, and can record 1-2 hours worth of footage, depending on which model you get.

There are only two possible improvements I could think of for this camcorder. First, I think it would be nice to have some way to lock the Flip, because it’s easy to hit buttons on accident when it’s turned on. I think because it only takes a few seconds to power on, they assume that you’ll just turn it on and off in between videos, but if there’s something neat happening I often like to leave it on so that I can take a few videos sequentially, and I find myself hitting buttons on accident because they’re so sensitive and almost deleting files. The other improvement I would suggest is in the software, because I find the way it saves files to be very confusing; I can’t control where it exports the saved files to, and it doesn’t tell you where on the computer they are, so it makes them very hard to locate.

I used to think I didn’t need a camcorder – now I don’t know what I’d do without it!

The Flip Mino HD can be purchased online at Flip’s website, Amazon, and many other retailers – click here for a full list.