Flip MinoHD Review

The Flip MinoHD is the most recent product from Pure Digital Technologies, a upstart company that has turned the mpeg recorder market on its head with its family of digital video recorders.

The Flip idea is simple - a little, handheld video camera reduced to its essentials. As compact as an iPod, it has no tapes and wishes no FireWire it records straight to integrated flash memory, pops a USB jack out the top, and mounts on your Mac's desktop with standard MPEG-4 video files ready to use.

The MinoHD's business design is largely unvaried from the Mino. It's tiny, swish, and black ; and the controls are ludicrously easy. Press the power button on the side, and the tiny, high resolution screen on the back lights up. Press the big red button on the back to start recording ; press it again to stop. Four seconds after taking it out of your pocket, you're recording HD video.

The MinoHD packs about sixty minutes of 720p video into its 4 GB of flash memory. 720p HD is 1280 pixels wide and, of course, 720 pixels tall. Consider that the 13'' MacBook's screen is 1280 by eight hundred pixels. The MinoHD's video fills that screen from side to side and nearly top to bottom with pointy, prime quality video. It's quite striking ; a commercial DVD ( which must be upscaled ) looks fuzzy by comparison.

Unlike a DV tape, the bitrate is variable depending on the source material. This implies real recording time could be more or less than one hour. The specification list explains it records at about 9 Mbit / sec, but most of our recordings were ten to 10.4 Mbit / sec. Video is encoded using the same H.264 scheme employed by HDTV. ( Unlike earlier Flips, you do not need to install a special codec to play the videos).

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