Review: Flip Mino HD

The Flip Mino HD.

Relevant offers

Gadgets

Review: Acer Aspire S3 Review: Sony Ericsson Xperia arc S 3D printing: saviour or piracy tool? Apple in talks on iTV Get ready for the Apple ... Treadmill? What's USB 3.0? Review: Dell XPS 14z notebook Robots bring beer but Rosie still takes cake Duck for cover, here comes the laser-guided bullet Angelic 'Jobs' loves Android in Taiwan ad

Has the Flip Mino HD sounded the death knell for the handicam? Well, it has for me.

I've always wanted to own a handicam or some sort of video camera that is portable and can be whipped out at a moment's notice.

Now I can with Flip's pint-sized Mino HD camcorder, which is roughly the size of a mobile phone and fits in a shirt pocket. The Flip takes everything I thought I knew about camcorders and turned it on its head. And that's good.

The black model I put through its paces comes with 4Gb of internal memory, enough for an hour's worth of high-definition video.

After taking the Flip Mino on a weekend away I really can't begin to say how impressed I am with this tiny device. I used it to video family moments and sports events and it came up trumps every time. Using it was child's play, all you do is press the big red button on the front to start and stop filming. You can flip through stored movies using the left and right arrow buttons.

OK, the 1.5-inch LCD viewing window is small and the Flip Mino doesn't offer a great zoom, but the video and audio is crisp and clear, and once you've taken a video you can either play it back there and then, viewing it on the screen, or delete it at the touch of a button.

Transferring the video to my home PC was simple. Slide a switch on the left of the device and a USB connector pops up out of the unit's top. Then, connect the Mino to your computer (automatically installing the Mino Flip software) and you can view the videos, edit them and save them to your computer - and being MP4 format means you can view them on just about every current media player.

The unit also comes with a TV Out connection so that you can connect it to your widescreen television using the supplied cables and show those wonderful holiday videos to anyone who comes calling.

The Flip Mino HD scores a huge number of points for me just on its size and the quality of its video. I might even ask Santa to get me one for Christmas, that's how impressed I was with it. Fingers crossed, eh?

* High-definition version: $349; standard def: $279

- © Fairfax NZ News