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The people at Pure Digital Technologies were kind enough to send us a Flip Mino HD to review and I’ve spent the last several days testing the device in a variety of circumstances and shooting conditions to help provide you with what you can expect if you’re thinking about purchasing one of these little HD camcorders. Released last week, the Flip Mino HD can record an hour’s worth of 720p high definition video encoded in H.264 MP4 at 30 frames per second on its 4GBs of internal storage. The device measures 4 x 2 x 0.6 inches, weighs only 3.3 ounces, and connects to your computer via a flip-out USB plug, no cables required. I tried a variety of shooting circumstances over the past several days, including recording in the rain, attaching the device to a fan and turning it on, attaching the Flip Mino HD to my dog for a dog’s eye view, hanging the Flip Mino HD out the window of a moving car on a tripod, and standard shooting on a tripod. Read on to discover what I found.

The Build

The Flip Mino HD feels solid but is extremely lightweight for its size, and, therefore, one wants to think it is fragile. Having dropped it several times during my test, I can say that it’s pretty sturdy and nicely scratch resistant. Feathers rarely break when dropped. The Flip Mino HD isn’t featherlight of course, and doesn’t slowly float to the ground, but having dropped it several times from about four feet at the highest and about a foot at the lowest, I can tell it’s well enough built to survive the normal tumbles that cellphone-sized devices tend to take from time to time as they’re knocked off desks or dropped out of pockets.

The USB connection flips (Flip, get it?) open via a switch on the side like a mini-switchblade. I flipped it open and closed it repeatedly over a 100 times straight just to see if it would start to fail or break, but even this moving part is well designed and consistently springs nicely out with no difficulty. The only part of the entire device that feels a bit flimsy is the small black plastic facade that folds down over the USB when closed. When closed, it feels fine, but when it’s open and hanging loosely out from the device the light plastic-ness of it with no support structure is clearly the part of the device that would be prone to snap off under the right set of unfortunate, clumsy circumstances (something like knocking your laptop off the desk while the Flip Mino HD is plugged into a USB port). Thanks to the light weight of the Flip Mino HD, the device can hang from a laptop’s USB port nicely without any sort of give or noticeable pull that could damage the port over time.

The Body

The body of the Flip Mino HD is made from a very shiny plastic that is like a magnet for your fingerprints. You can most likely spot a few smudges in the pictures accompanying this review. These are both inevitable and unavoidable no matter how clean your hands, so if fingerprints are a pet peeve of yours, this alone may be a deal breaker for you. Despite it’s ultra-shininess, the device isn’t slippery in the least and has a nice grip. The plastic is also nicely resistant to water so some slights bit of moisture splashing on the device won’t hurt it, although getting the device really wet, as with most electronics will probably short it out and make it unusable.

The Flip Mino HD’s form-factor is like that of a small candybar cellphone, slightly thicker than an iPhone but not as wide or tall as the iPhone. The lens on the front of the device looks like a much bigger version of the kind seen on several camera phones. You could definitely manage to shoot some footage of someone without them knowing it, by holding the device up to your ear as if you were talking on it and pointing the lens in the person’s direction. It slips comfortably into nearly any pocket you may have, and I was able to slide it into my front left pant pocket next to my iPhone with no difficulty. It’s comfortable to hold in the palm of your hand. When filming, you end up holding the device like you would hold a cellphone while dialing. People accustomed to filming with “regularly shaped” camcorders will have to make some adjustments to get used to the Flip Mino HD, as the rectangular shape is a bit odd. It’s quite easy to move the camera about much more than you would if you were holding a regular camcorder with an eyepiece up to your eye and filming directly where you were looking.

The Screen

Measuring only 1.5 inches corner to corner, the screen on the MinoHD is not just small, it’s tiny. Since the device records in 16:9 aspect ratio, the video doesn’t even take up the full height of the screen. The strips at the top and bottom of the video give you metadata like how much recording time is left, whether you’re recording or not, how far along in play back you are, and a battery indicator. The screen serves as live viewfinder on the device, showing you what you’re recording as you record it, and because of this, the Flip Mino HD is not designed for filming yourself. Turning the device towards oneself for filming is a bit of a guessing game without someone else around to tell you how the shot looks.

The Speakers

The speakers sit on either side of the screen and actually do a pretty decent job of playing back the audio recorded. Unfortunately, unless there is a TV around for attaching to the Mino HD via the included composite video cable, the internal speakers on the device are your only option, as there is no headphone jack for monitoring the audio.

The Controls

The controls are pretty basic. There is one switch on the left top side when holding the screen towards you that flips open the USB. There are two clickable buttons on the device, the power button on the top right side when holding the screen towards you and the red button, which is used for starting and stopping recording and for opening the settings menu by holding down this button when powering on the Flip Mino HD. The rest of the controls are touch sensitive controls: a pause / play button used for pausing and playing videos; a delete button for deleting videos; left and right arrow buttons for navigating forwards and backwards from one pre-recorded video to the next or for fast-forwarding or rewinding a video during playback by holding them down; and a plus sign and minus sign for turning the volume up and down during playback and for zooming in and out while recording or using the screen as a viewfinder when preparing to record.

Ports

On the bottom right corner of the Flip Mino HD (if you’re holding the screen facing you) there’s a place to attach the included wrist strap. On the bottom left corner of the Flip Mino HD (if you’re holding the screen facing you) there’s a plug for the included TV composite cable adapter. Unfortunately, the plug is a mini plug and not a standard-sized plug, so you won’t be able to pick up a replacement easily should you lose it. I was also disappointed that I couldn’t stick headphones in this jack to listen to video playback when you’re on the go. That being said, hooking the device up to a TV via the included cable worked well on my 32-inch Sony WEGA HDTV.

On the bottom of the device is a standard thread for attaching to a tripod.

Video Quality

The Flip Mino HD records in 720p 16:9 aspect ratio video, so it is capable of recording very highly detailed video. One of the best features of the Flip Mino HD, its diminutive size and ease of carrying, is also one of its greatest weaknesses. The Mino HD shot best when held completely still on a tripod. If you’re a star cinematographer in the making with a very steady hand or a tripod, you’ll no doubt shoot lots of great footage with the Mino HD. If you’re more the type to pull a camera out of your pocket and start filming while running, you’re going to experience some mixed results.

Because of the large amount of detail at the Mino HD’s disposal and the small size of the lens, even the slightest movements when filming can appear very jarring. Also, highly detailed views with lots of motion tend to create an imagined bit of noise. The picture is crystal clear, but it naturally should be more blurred and not as sharp as the picture produced by the Mino HD. This is evident in the first segment of the below video where my pet pug is running through a lot of leaves and I’m recording the action by simply holding the Mino HD.

Additionally, extremely vibrant and bright colors tend to wash out somewhat on the Mino HD, as can be seen in the video segment of my bright green and red Eclectus parrots, where some of the details of their feathers are lost due to their bright colors.

The Flip Mino HD would not be a good camcorder for illegally making copies of a motion picture, even though it is quite easy to sneak into a movie theater, thanks to its small size. Granted it can only record an hour of video, so you would have to bring more than one Mino HD with you if you intended to capture an entire movie. Even if you were to do this, you would find too much flicker in the video you shot as can be seen in the movie theater segment from the video below.

The Flip Mino HD, like most cameras, loves light, and low-light shooting results in the colors veering towards red and some slight noise being added to the picture as can be seen in the dinner segment from the video below.

The bulbous casing around the lens on the Flip Mino HD would appear to have a slight wide angle lens effect that can manifest in certain situations. When filming the car test footage, you can see that shapes passing by lean, morph, and are distorted by a combination of the fast movement and the shape of the lens on the Flip Mino HD. This optic distortion is most likely happening to a lesser degree with any quick movements by the camera or any time things being filmed by the camera move quickly.

Despite these minor issues, the Flip Mino HD is a very versatile high definition video camera simply because of its small size. It was easy to stick the device on a tripod and hang it out the window of a moving car without worry about dropping it, simply because of how light the thing is, and, thankfully, the tripod thread on the bottom of the device is extremely sturdy. Near the end of the video below, I attempted three times to provide you with a “doggie eye view” by tucking the Mino HD into my dog’s collar. This was only mildly successful for a few seconds, as Thatcher inevitably shook her head and dislodged the device. The Mino HD wasn’t hurt or scratched by any of this and if I had actually spent some time constructing a way to attach the diminutive camcorder to my dog, it could be used to get this type of footage. At the very end of the video below, I added a warning, because I strapped the Mino HD to my GorillaPod tripod which has bendable legs that can be wrapped around things, and wrapped the tripod around the ceiling fan in my office. Then I turned the fan on. The result was some very motion-sickness inducing footage, but the light Mino HD held on with no difficulty. One thing I didn’t try that I think would work would be duct-taping the Mino HD to the front or rear bumper of a car to film some footage that way. I’m sure it would work fine, but didn’t get a chance to try it because of how rainy it was during the weekend I had the camcorder for testing.

Battery Life

I didn’t conduct any hard and fast testing of the battery life, but I did shoot quite a lot of footage, reviewing it on the camera, hooking it up to my television to see how it looked there, deleting bad shots, and recording new shots. In short, I used the camera much in the same way that any new owner of the device enamored with using it all the time would, and during that time, it never ran out of battery. I did run out of space for recording several times and was forced to plug the Flip Mino HD back into my computer so that I could copy files over and then delete all the files to begin shooting again. Of course, every time I plugged the device into my computer, it began charging again while I was copying files off of it.

Bundled Software

The Flip Mino HD mounts as a flash storage device on both PCs and Macs, so getting the MP4-formatted video files off of the device can be as simple as navigating to the 100VIDEO folder on the device and dragging it over to the computer to copy the files. You can even drag MP4 files back into this same folder on the device for watching on the go.

Both iMovie and iPhoto on OS X recognized the Flip Mino HD. iPhoto recognized the device but could not render thumbnail previews of the video files on the Mino HD. However, iPhoto did import the videos without any difficulty. iMovie, on the other hand, recognized the device, generated thumbnails for all the videos and then consistently failed to import any of the files at the very end of the import process. If you choose Import Movies from iMovie, however, and navigate to the 100VIDEO folder on the Flip Mino HD, the videos import to iMovie without any problems whatsoever.

If you’re not familiar with any of these tools and you’re totally new to the world of video recording then you’ll be pleased with the FlipShare software that comes on the device and works with both Windows and OS X. You can preview files, copy them to your computer, trim the beginnings and endings, and upload them directly to sites like YouTube via the software. You can also take snapshots from the videos to act as still pictures, play the videos at fullscreen, and burn DVDs of the videos directly from the easy to use FlipShare software.

Overall Convenience

The best thing about the Flip Mino HD is that it’s an HD camcorder that fits in your pocket and doesn’t need anything else. Sure it comes with a TV composite cable if you want to hook it up to your TV, but you don’t have to pack that cable. If you’re looking for a nice little on the go video studio, all you need is your laptop, the Flip Mino HD, and perhaps a small portable tripod for setting up your shot. There’s no AC adapter to keep track of, although if you love AC adapters, Pure Digital Technologies is coming out for one for the Flip Mino HD. There’s no specialized cable you need to connect the device to your computer. There’s no insanely difficult to learn bundled software.

What’s missing?

I think the two glaring things missing from this device are the lack of a headphone jack and the lack of a snapshot mode for taking still pictures. Sure, you can use the FlipShare software to take a still from a segment of video that you shot, but considering how streamlined for convenience the Flip Mino HD is, this added cumbersome measure looks like an oversight by the designers. I could also use an audio-only mode for taking voice notes, but this somewhat defeats the simplicity of this device.

What we hope to see in future models

A standard-sized port for the TV cable that also works with a standard set of headphones. A way to take a digital still photo with the device.

What would make this a truly killer device

If Pure Digital Technologies were to partner with Sprint to add a WhisperNet always-on EV-DO connection to the device, like Amazon added to the Kindle, so that it could be used for live streaming video online to services like Ustream and Qik, the Flip Mino HD would become a truly amazing device for broadcasting video. As is, the quick convenience of shooting, plugging into a computer, and quickly uploading to services like YouTube is still nothing to sneeze at.

Obsessable Recommendation

If you’re looking for a really small video camera that can fit in your pocket and handle high definition video, then for only $229 the Flip Mino HD won’t disappoint. If you’re looking for a device that can be used for unique shooting situations like duct-taping to the front of a car, then the Flip Mino HD may be the ideal camera for you. If, however, you’re just looking to upload videos to YouTube, then the high definition of the device won’t really be serving you well and you’d probably be better served by buying a less expensive camera from another manufacturer or the Flip Mino or Flip Video Ultra from Pure Digital Technologies.

by C.K. Sample III