Flip Mino HD: We tested basically every pocket camcorder in existence, and this was one of the best. It shoots 720p HD and is easy enough for your grandma to use. If you’re buying a gift for someone looking to experiment on a budget or simply shoot vacation videos, this is a great little cam. $AU298 [Flip]

Clapboard: No, I’m serious. Though this might just look like a cheesy prom prop (and that’s what it is), little has changed about the most recognised icon of the film industry. And for filmmakers, it’s still extremely handy in tracking good takes, and syncing sound, if needed. The novelty ones are cheap (and many are probably more for show); but splurge on a fancy dry erase version if you really love the recipient. $US2 to $US30 [Prom Wishes ; B&H]

Vintage Hollywood Photographs from Life Magazine: Vintage posters are neat, but I’d contend that these Life prints feel a tad more heart-felt. From Kubrick working on 2001 to Marilyn Monroe doing her thing, there are many gems to be found in Life’s archives. About $US100 [2001 Series; More Life Photos]

Iron Man Arc Reactor: Most people’s latent super powers are still off in hiding, but you never know when a nemesis will rip out your power core, forcing you to crawl across your home for a spare. Don’t look at the Iron Man Arc Reactor as a superfluous purchase; see it as an investment your loved one’s health. $US150 [Museum Replicas]

Sony UWP-V1 Wireless Lavalier Mic: During my tenure in broadcast and commercial production, I found a good, wireless lavalier mic to be the most versatile tool in my bag. It can be hidden anywhere on a body/prop, and the pickup frequencies are surprisingly decent for foleying. Sony’s entry level mic, the UWP-V1, should serve any young filmmaker well. $US485 [B&H]

Kodak Five-Day Cinematography Workshop: Few of us will ever have the chance to shoot on real 35mm film. But Kodak’s boot camp will teach you the basics of 35mm cinematography and give you a chance to burn some 35mm stock while experts hold your hand. The tuition is by no means a non-factor, but come on, it’s pretty much the coolest fantasy camp without Michael Jordan or spaceships. The workshop is only offered in LA… $US2000 [Kodak]

DON’T BUY Back to the Future 2 Hat: I know, it’s neat you can buy this hat. But it looked dumb on Marty McFly and it will look even worse on whoever you give it to. [Amazon]

4K Red One Camera: Yes, the body itself starts at nor far under $US20,000 — without lenses, mounts, CF modules or pretty much anything you’ll need to use it. Yes, this camera is just as hard to shoot with as any full-fledged film camera (if not even harder). But it’s also the cheapest 4K camera you can acquire, and for the price of one extended 35mm camera rental, you’ll have a system that’s “free to use” again and again. Just make sure to gift those cinematography classes first. From $US17,500 [Red]

Don’t forget to recommend your own favourite gift ideas for movie buffs in the comments.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favourite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We’ll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

Pocket camcorders (aka mini cams or budget cams, or sometimes Flip cams after the pioneer of the category) are simple gadgets. They’ve got one job to do: Shoot watchable video, often for uploading to streaming video sites. They’re also very close to the end of their lifespan, with perhaps only a year or so left before smartphones make them obsolete, but right now they’re the easiest and cheapest way to take quick and dirty videos. I tested seven of these diminutive camcorders, or more accurately six camcorders and one capable PMP, in five categories: Outdoor, indoor, low light, macro and sound.

The criteria for judging fell mostly to smoothness of video during motion, image sharpness, noise and colour reproduction. Specs like storage capacity, screen size and battery life are mostly the same across the board, although overall, compared to last year, this crop of mini cams are faster and stronger with beefed up memory and HD sensors. All save the iPod Nano take 720p video (or better) and add HDMI ports and more memory to accommodate the higher-quality footage. Yet I wasn’t really all that thrilled with any of the camcorders — the bar for these cams is so low you could trip over it, and several of them actually did. Battery life was disappointing across the board, as none could break two hours of filming. Anyway, on to the results!

Results

Choosing between the Kodak Zi8, Flip Mino HD and Flip Ultra HD is tricky. The Zi8 is unreliable, but when it’s good it’s unbelievably good; the Mino HD is diminutive, solid and stylish, but overpriced and with lousy touch controls; and the Ultra HD is a reliably good shooter with a low price and the best controls of all, but physically unappealing (read: fat as hell). In my opinion, you should never judge a book by its obese cover, so the champion is… the Flip Ultra HD!

Flip Ultra HD: First Place

Flip’s Ultra HD is the best overall choice. It’s one of the cheapest cams around (at $US150, it’s $US70 less than it’s younger brother, the Mino HD), but it tied for the highest score in our lineup, and it features nice tactile controls that I much prefer to the sleeker Mino HD’s touch-sensitive exercise in frustration. Unfortunately, the Dom DeLuise HD is upsettingly fat — about twice as thick as the Mino HD, but even that doesn’t really get across how truly large it feels in the hand. It’s not particularly heavy, but it is by a long shot the thickest pocket cam here. On the plus side, that girth hides a useful battery — Flip includes a rechargeable pack, but the John Candy HD can also use two AA batteries, which is great since pocket cams have generally abysmal battery life (usually about an hour, though of course they’re often rated for double or triple that). Replaceable, cheap batteries are really nice, but some will have to decide whether the William Howard Taft HD’s girth is worth that feature. Given its price, I think it is.

Video quality is just fine, above average if not particularly impressive on every test, and it, like the Mino HD, is extremely user-friendly. Although that simplicity yields less flexibility and a barebones feature set compared to the Kodak Zi8, it’s a good distillation of the aims of pocket camcorders, and its 100 per cent tactile controls are a welcome change from the Mino HD. If you’re not superficial, it’s a very smart buy.

Flip Mino HD: Second Place

Flip’s Mino HD is the best-looking and best-feeling camcorder I tried. Its aluminium body feels solid and expensive, which might be because it is — at $US230, it’s the priciest camcorder I tested. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it sells the best, even though it’s not the greatest deal, because it looks (and is) simple, cute and functional. I won’t rehash my review, except to say that I hate those goddamn touch buttons more and more every time I use the Mino HD. They’re incredibly sensitive and I guarantee that you will accidentally trigger the playback function more times than you can count.

Besides that, it’s totally serviceable: It did well on all of my tests, it’s thoughtfully designed and stupid-easy to use. But it’s definitely overpriced, and I have a hard time recommending it over its physically awkward yet substantially cheaper older brother, the Ultra HD, just for its looks.

Kodak Zi8: Third Place

Wider and taller than the Flip Ultra HD, though not nearly as fat, the Zi8 packs a 1080p sensor and the largest and best screen of the bunch. The controls are easy and tactile and aside from flimsy-feeling plastic covers over the ports (one of mine already fell off), the hardware is high-quality. The Zi8 snagged the bronze medal, because while its highs were higher than either of the Flips, its lows were lower — and given how focused and simple this type of gadget is, reliability is worth more than flashing moments of greatness.

The Zi8 absolutely rocked in two of my tests, outdoor and macro, with perfect colour reproduction and excellent clarity, and it even takes pretty decent still photos (think point-and-shoot circa 2006 quality). But the conditions need to be just right to get the most out of this guy — I first tried it in 1080p mode (neither of the Flips can break 720p) and while picture quality was amazing, scenes with lots of motion were pretty jerky to the point of being distracting. But even in 720p, it was still head-and-shoulders above the competition — but only in outdoor and macro testing. In the indoor test it proved to have difficulty focusing on objects closer than 3m but farther than 0.5m away, and low light shooting was distinctly tinted red and a bit dark. It wasn’t unusable in any test (unlike the similarly uneven Creative Vado HD) and at $US180 it’s fairly priced, so I’d still recommend it — but you and I are likely to be more forgiving of the Zi8’s flaws than, say, your mum, who just wants a camera that works pretty well all the time. For her, go for a Flip.

The Rest

The Creative Vado HD scored pretty high, only a point lower than the bronze medallist Kodak Zi8, but while its design is fairly middle-of-the-road (albeit nice and teeny), its abilities were all over the place. It was one of the worst in standard daytime shooting (it has a hard time with sunlight, a serious problem for a pocket cam) and macro, but was the best at indoor, and while its low light video was a little dark, it was the clearest and smoothest of the lot. It also, likely due to Creative’s background in stellar-sounding PMPs and sound cards, boasts excellent sound quality. At $US150, it’s very fairly priced, but I can’t recommend a camcorder that mangles sunlight the way the Vado does.

Apple’s iPod Nano is the only “camcorder” in this roundup to peak at VGA resolution, and aside from a surprisingly strong macro performance, it shows. It turned vibrant colours dull and lifeless, washed out detail and made everything seem darker than it was. It can’t compete with the Zi8s and Flips of the world, but it’s still usable and incredibly priced at $US150/$180 for 8GB/16GB — if you’ve got a Nano already, you probably won’t need a dedicated cam. Convergence killed the video star, I guess.

The JVC Picsio GC-FM1 sucked. It’s spectacularly ugly (think Ed Hardy-inspired) and feels cheap with a confusing button layout (unforgivable in a pocket cam) and a high price ($US200, or $US178 at Amazon). Besides all that, it scored poorly in every one of our tests. Avoid.

And finally, the worst — Aiptek’s PenCam HD. I wanted to like it, I really did &mdash ;it’s got a tongue-depressor-like design and came with a sweet tripod that attaches to a bicycle’s handlebars — but it bombed in almost every one of my tests. The 1.1-inch screen is nearly unusable and battery life barely topped 40 minutes, so it’s definitely the loser here.

Don Nguyen assisted with this Battlemodo.

The original Mino HD was one of the simplest, easiest-to-use pocket cams out there. Its video quality was nothing to write home about (and paled in comparison to, say, the Kodak Zi8), but it sold boatloads based on its good looks and respectable performance. So what does the new Mino HD bring to the table?

What’s New
The new Mino HD definitely feels better in the hand than its predecessor. It’s only marginally smaller (about 1.5 millimeters thinner, same width and height) but the upgrade to aluminium from glossy plastic makes it feel much more solid and expensive. The other improvements are welcome as well—the new screen is both larger (2 inches compared to 1.5) and significantly sharper, and it’s now packing 8GB of internal memory, twice that of the first Mino HD. That 8GB of memory allows for about two hours of 720p recording. Also new is an HDMI-out jack for sharing videos on HD screens, and it also boasts a faster processor (I didn’t see a difference in performance, but Flip says battery life is improved).

What’s Unchanged, but Shouldn’t Be
As it’s packing the same sensor as the first Mino HD, this new version shares the same strengths and suffers from the same flaws: Good in solid lighting and close-ups, but noisy in low-light and choppy while panning. It still can’t take stills, there’s no optical zoom, and there’s no image stabilizer. Also unchanged are those damn touch-sensitive buttons. I accidentally hit the “Play” touch-button several times because you don’t have to depress an actual, tactile button to make commands, which is super annoying. Tactile buttons would be a lot more accurate and result in less accidental presses.

As always, we should mention that the days of dedicated pocket cams like the Mino HD are numbered. They’re surrounded on all sides, with the iPod Nano hitting them from the low-end and smartphones hitting them from the high. Since convergence is already killing PMPs, we don’t see this kind of gadget lasting all that much longer. That being said…

The Flip Mino HD is a solid choice for a pocket cam, since it’s sort of the distillation of what the pocket cam category aims for: It’s dead simple, to a fault sometimes, takes decent but not amazing video, and is sleek and pocketable. We’d really have liked to see some improvements to the Mino HD’s sensor (as well as the merciless execution of those touch-buttons), but overall it’s still a pretty decent cam. This new version sells for $US230, while the older 4GB model drops to $US200—and we’d say the improvements are worth the extra $US30 if you’re torn between the two. The Flip Mino HD is available now.

Solid-feeling aluminium case

Doubled memory, bigger and better screen, and HDMI-out are welcome additions

Dead simple UI, but it lacks more advanced features

Video quality is okay, but unchanged from last-gen

Touch-sensitive buttons seem designed purely to infuriate

I’ve also got the Dyson Air Multiplier here, and it’s a super sexy toy, although the novelty wears off after a few minutes. It is just a fan, after all. A very stylish fan, but a fan.

Finally, I’ve got a Flip Mino HD to play around with. I’m sure I’ll be taking lots of videos of my dog and baby, which I’ll refrain from posting here on Giz. Don’t want you guys thinking I’m a wus or anything…

What gadgets are you playing with this weekend?

The Mino is set to cost $230, while the MinoHD will set you back $300.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on one to play around with. There’s something infinitely appealing about a pocket camcorder with decent quality video. Not to mention guest-editor Chris seemed to like it…

It’s been upgraded to 8GB of memory, up from 4GB, which gives it about two hours of 720p video recording. The aluminium shell feels great: Much more solid and smaller in the hand than the previous plastic version. The screen is also significantly bigger, feeling much less puny at 2-inches. The Flip software has also seen an update, with some nice minor editing and trimming features, and features automatic uploading to Facebook, Myspace and Youtube. I haven’t gotten the chance to play around with it too much, but video quality seems okay—about the same as past MinoHDs, and not as good as the Kodak zi8.

The new MinoHD will sell for $US230, while the original MinoHD will remain at $US199 for 4GB. [Flip]

Flip MinoHD, 2nd Generation Camcorder Features:

* SRP: $US229.99
* Now Available at leading retailers and online retailers
* Colors: Brushed Metal or personalised at theflip.com
* Video Resolution: High Definition, 1280 x 720
* Records: 2 hours (8 GB built-in memory)
* Screen: 2 inch – transflective (anti-glare); 960 x 240 pixels
* Audio: Built-in wide-range, omni-directional microphone; built-in speaker with software volume control
* Battery: Built-in rechargeable (Lithium Ion); up to 2 hours use
* TV Output: Widescreen with HDMITM output
* Zoom: 2 x Digital

The details are slim on the FCC page, but the pictures show a very simple, Fisher Price looking, design. Could Flip be getting into the home video recording space? My guess is as good as yours. [FCC via Engadget]

To be sure, the Zoom Q3 looks like it neglects video quality in favour of audio: Its paltry 640×480 resolution is sure to look outdated next to the true 720p offered by the Flip UltraHD and others. But the Q3 is all about audio, and we’re pretty impressed with what Zoom packed into it. You can see in the picture above that it’s got two mics to give true stereo sound, and they can be aimed both manually and with the camcorder’s automatic presets. It looks pretty easy to get correct levels as well, with several modes to help get the best possible sound. As for audio formats, it’ll do 44.1/48kHz 16/24-bit Linear PCM WAV or MP3 up to 320kbps, which is slightly limited but should do fine.

At the basic hardware level, it’s got a 2.4-inch LCD, takes SDHC cards for memory (a 2GB card is included, but you’ll want to upgrade that pronto) and runs on 2 AA batteries. It’ll cost $US250 when it ships in September, which is a little pricey; the Flip UltraHD costs $US180 at Amazon. We’re not totally sold on the entire package, either: If the Q3 packed HD video as well as this level of audio, we’d be really excited, but we think video is probably more important for most pocket camcorder users than audio. Still, it’s definitely a unique product and hopefully we’ll see the product line develop more. [Zoom]

It’s a form-factor that doesn’t leave much room for creativity, but Samsung’s managed to put together a distinctive product with the HMX-U10. The slightly swept design allows for more comfortable gripping than the flat bricks we’ve all grown accustomed to, and the compact profile—56mm x 103mm x 15.5mm—belies its solid, and most notably its ability to record 1080p H.264 video, as opposed to the industry standard 720p. Otherwise, we’re in familiar territory here: there’s a one-touch YouTube upload button, fixed-focus lens, expandable SD storage and a two-inch LED screen.

Also, with the emphasis on still shooting, I’m noticing a conceptual problem: point-and-shoot cameras have been getting more and more video savvy in the last few years, and now, mini-camcorders are aspiring to be pocket cameras. They’re roughly the same size, and assuming a tag of around $US200—suspected, but not certain—for the HMX-U10, fall into the same price range. The future won’t be pretty for one category or the other, and that’s not even considering the increasingly capable imaging capabilities of modern smartphones. What will kill what is still up in the air, but you can rest assured the slaughter will be well-recorded. [InfoSyncWorld]