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 Price: $299

The Verdict: I could probably learn to like it more over time, but after using it for a couple of weeks, my general feeling is that I much prefer the Flip.

There are a few reasons: the biggest being the controls. While the Flip Mino HD has one big red button that stops and starts, plus some touch sensitive controls for volume and zoom, the buttons on the PICSIO aren’t quite touch sensitive, but aren’t quite mechanical either. Turning the device on sometimes takes a couple of attempts, and there’s precious little feedback from the buttons, which can be a bit frustrating here.

The second thing that’s kind of frustrating is storage – the PICSIO records to SDHC cards, which means you can never run out of storage, right? Well, a 2GB card means you get about 19 minutes of footage. That’s not a lot. To get a full hour, that means you’d need to get a 16GB card, which aren’t exactly cheap. All of a sudden, your $299 purchase has blown out to around $500 if you get a decent quality card.

The actual video quality though is pretty good. Unless you zoom in. Or shoot in low light. But they’re both issues common to these types of cameras. Still photos also suffer in terms of definition and focus – make no mistake, you’re better off with a dedicated pocket snapper for photos if you want quality shots. If you’re happy with taking photos on your phone though, these are on par, if not slightly better.

Image stabilisation is a welcome addition – it’s a digital stabilisation though, so it’s not fantastic, but it does work.

There are a few areas the PICSIO decimates the Flip – the screen is much bigger and therefore easier to see; there’s an HDMI and AV output rather than just USB, and there’s a macro switch on the side, although the benefit in performance using it is negligible.

Overall though, I think I prefer the Flip for its ease of use and inbuilt storage. The step up to “1080p” with the PICSIO just isn’t enough – the lens isn’t that much better to really benefit from the spec, and ultimately I find the inbuilt storage and ease of use more important for this class of device. But if you’ve got a crapload of SD cards lying around, the PICSIO could be a good option for you.

I like how they justify it:

There is time date stamp for the record, you can get the most authentic evidence for a variety of illegal behaviour. Ideal for CIA agents, police, detector, and spy agency.

That sounds about right, because we all know that CIA agents shop in Chinese crapware sites. The $US243 Pinhole Spy Toothbrush Hidden Camera DVR records 640×480 video in AVI format, using its internal 8GB flash memory. According to their product site, it looks exactly like a real electric toothbrush. It also looks like a whole bag of hurt to me. [Omejo]

Kinda Like the Old One

The GoPro Hero HD is squarely based off the old model. It has the same mounting system, case, physical shape and user interface. In fact, it’s so similar that I suggest you read the original short review I did and then come back here for the low down on what makes this one better. Here’s the link. Or you could just take these basic points as a foundation.
• Awesome mounts for everything.
• Meant to be semi cheap so you don’t sweat it, yet capable.
• It has a 170-degree field of vision and the case makes it waterproof to 30m. Very rugged.
• Two buttons for controlling the basic UI. Shoot, toggle modes. The UI is so rudimentary you’ll often forget how to use it, but all you need to do is turn it on and shoot.
• There’s no native LCD for viewing replays.
• It’s not tiny.

The Video is Now HD

Instead of the paltry 512×384, the $US270 camera with surf mount has several modes, most HD. On the higher frame per second mode, which was silky smooth when played back normally, there are standard definition resolutions of 848×480 or HD 720p/1280×720. Both are 16:9 ratio, which is recommended only for motorsports or other activities where you’re not trying to catch yourself in frame standing up. The 60fps modes are noticeably smoother in normal playback but they’re meant to also look better if you slow down the frame rate playback for slow motion in your favourite video editor. The grain was noticeably worse when using 60fps indoors, but it’s not a deal breaker. At 30fps, there are modes for 720p again, but also 1280×960 which is 4:3 high def. That’s the default and I used that for surfing. The 1080p mode is 16:9, and 30fps but limits the field of vision from 170 to 127 degrees. Again, the 16:9 modes are used less than you’d expect in sports shots. There’s also a centre-weighted mode for exposing the road when shooting from inside a car, and it leaves the dashboard underexposed properly.

The bottom line is that this new camera is in HD. That’s the big improvement

Quality

This is a still of the movie at full res, not the actual 5MP stills.

First, watch the movies the guys at the company produced here. Then watch my shitty one filled with shitty surfing. Colours were a little washy/green but the ocean and the sky together, with the lens collecting droplets, well, that isn’t an ideal situation. Watch it for yourself and form your own conclusions, but note the reflections off the water which will inform you of pretty decent autoexposure and sharpness. It’s a vast improvement over other sports cams and the standard def version. Oh, a little thing held over from the last generation that isn’t a ding or a plus: the 170-degree angle is great for reducing apparent vibration and for making sure what you want in shot is in the frame, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making things like waves and jumps and other otherwise impressive looking things seem smaller.

Storage Capacity

The 51 minutes of video I took were 4.6GB big in the standard 4:3 ratio 1280×960 video. That was enough res for me to enjoy it on the screen. Here’s what Justin at GoPro told me the camera would store, which is a little more generous than what I found but still in the same ballpark.

Average recording times:
1080p: 12 min/GB
960p: 14 min/GB
720p: 16min/GB @30fps; 11 min/GB @ 60fps

GoPro recommended you use fast SDHC cards to save battery life, and on a 32GB card you can get almost six hours of recordings, although you’d be constrained by battery life. Oh one annoyance — every time you clear the card, the files are named from 001, 002, again. So if you copy them over to the same location, they’ll ask you if you want to overwrite. I wish the camera kept its file name numbers in series.

Battery Life

The other big change is that instead of being powered by a pair of AAAs, GoPro jammed a 1100mAh, 3.7-volt battery in the case. I did not do a full run-down test, but shooting 51 minutes of video didn’t reduce the charge even one notch; GoPro estimates you can get 2.5 hours of battery life from the camera in normal climates, regardless of the definition of video you’re shooting. The old model died quickly in the cold if you weren’t using rechargeables but this camera’s housing retains a bit more heat making it better for colder weather. You charge it by USB. Unfortunately you can’t charge it while doing a USB transfer yet. They hope to fix this with a firmware update later.

Sound

Sound quality during dry sports is aided by an open back housing door. But even with the closed door during surfing, the sound was fine. A benefit of the closed housing door is that wind noise is nil.

Stills

I didn’t test stills in this mode, but GoPro claims the 5-megapixel shots are better due to better processing. There are several still modes, as before: Single shot, triple shot that takes three shots over two seconds and a time lapse mode that can be set to record a shot every two, five, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. And a 10-second delay timer. For me, this is not why you get a sports camera.

The Surf Mount, in Particular

It’s 3M double sticky and it seems to hold up just fine. You clean your board of wax and then use a bit of rubbing alcohol to apply it. Let it settle overnight. To get it off (permanently) you use a hair dryer, which sounds a bit scary when it comes to something nice and fibreglass, but what do I know? (That’s why I put this one on a pop out longboard.

The Future

Another big but so far not useful thing on the new camera is the expansion port. They plan on offering a bigger back door for the case so you can fit in an external LCD screen for replays or an extra battery pack. I like the idea. I’m thinking they could probably go ahead and work on making the camera smaller even if it costs a bit more, in the next generation, though. I like GoPro enough to use it, even though gadgets on the mountain or in the surf piss me off by way of distraction. Now that they’ve got mounts, higher resolutions and battery endurance covered, I think making it even smaller is the next step to making it more enjoyable.

High def modes

Best mounting options in the business

Rugged, yet affordable case good for bumps and waterproof to 30m

Wide angle lens captures 170 degrees of motion so you fit in the shot and vibration is dampened.

Smooth 60fps great for action shots

Relatively cheap for what you get

Case kind of biggish

The can also has a wireless remote, rechargeable battery and a false bottom that hides a USB port and the on/off switch. It looks pretty convincing, but I’m less impressed by the ’80s-looking version of Coke “Clossic”. [ChinaGrabber via Technabob via DVICE]

The Vivitar DVR 150 has a 1.8-inch LCD screen, 2GB of built-in memory expandable using Secure Digital cards, USB male prong built-in, TV out, webcam mode, and comes in four different colours for $US50. [ChipChick]

Dabe Alan got a vintage gadget tattoo of his own, but he shot the process in time lapse with a very modern Canon 5d Mark II before editing this video in Final Cut Pro. Ouchies. [Flickr]

Spec for spec, the Picsio is a near-match for the Kodak Zi8 — currently the best pocket camcorder on the market, to my mind. That means multiple video modes, from 30fps 1080p (UPDATE: Though it appears the actual resolution is 1440×1080, not the normal 1920×1080. More on that—which isn’t actually a huge deal—here) to 60fps 720p to regular old VGA, 8MP still shooting, a mechanical macro mode switch, image stabilisation and HDMI out. What it doesn’t have in microphone inputs it more than makes up for in USB charging (the Zi8 had a DC charger). Here it’s pictured next to a Zi6, which is roughly the same size as the Zi8. As you can see, JVC’s camcorder is small — it’s sized like some of the daintier Flip cams, but with much more impressive guts.

The most striking thing, though probably one of the least important, is the glittery, faceted backplate. You, the camera operator, won’t notice it. Your subject, however, may think you’re some kind of foppish dandy, or whatnot.

A full Battlemodo, Picsio included, is forthcoming.

New JVC Pocket Camera Shoots HD Video & 8 Megapixel Stills

JVC enters pocket cam market with stylish, high-performance PICSIO.

WAYNE, NJ, October 13, 2009 – JVC today announced the launch of its first pocket flash memory camera, the new PICSIO GC-FM1. PICSIO is designed for those who want a small, simple, camera that allows easy sharing and delivers high quality video and still images.

PICSIO shoots true eight-megapixel stills and 1080p Full HD video for outstanding results even when viewed on an HDTV. Further enhancing the quality of PICSIO’s video is image stabilization that minimizes camera shake, even when the 4X digital zoom is used. The camera is about the size of a small cell phone, and is available in three colors – Black Ice, Blue Steel and Purple Passion. It boasts a stylish design with a case that features a tone-on-tone geometric pattern and chrome accents for a jewel-like appearance.

PICSIO’s high quality images result from the use of an eight-megapixel CMOS image sensor that captures JPEG stills with up to eight-megapixel native resolution – there’s no image-degrading interpolation, so PICSIO images are sharp and vibrant, whether viewed on a screen or printed. In video mode, PICSIO records 1080p Full HD video that’s easily enjoyed on an HDTV by using the camera’s HDMI connection. Videos are recorded in the widely-used MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 format and stored as .MOV files for easy sharing without the need for time-consuming and potentially damaging conversion. Storage is on readily-available SD/SDHC memory cards.

Of course, even the miniest of mini camcorders cannot be crammed into the shell of an existing shuffle, so Xiangyun Industry Co did the sensible thing and sacrificed the music player to focus on transforming the device into a spy camera. Features include a 1.3MP sensor with VGA resolution and the ability to capture 1280×960 still photos. Not bad for $US15-$US30, but you are going to need to outfit an entire spy ring if you want to get your hands on one. Orders are only taken in bulk with a 100-unit minimum. [Global Sources via Red Ferret]