We press record on the Pure Digital Flip Mino, a phone-sized camcorder, and see if the videos are worth uploading in our full review.
Review summary of the Pure Digital Flip Mino:
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 The Pure Digital Flip Mino isn't going to replace a full-size, high quality camcorder any time soon, but that doesn't mean the camcorder isn't a useful device. If you've ever found yourself recording video on your cell phone, even if you have a high-end multimedia smartphone, the Flip Video would be a good choice for an ultra-compact camcorder because its video quality, while not great, is much better than what you'll get from a phone. Some more control might have helped, especially under low light conditions, and our shaky hands long for image stabilization on this device, but we have to hand it to Pure Digital for keeping things as simple as can be. Technophobes who just want to press record and start taping will enjoy this aspect, but we'll definitely go for something with more options when it's time to record baby's first steps. Release: July 2008. Price: $180.
Pros: Very small and simple. Great design with integrated USB connector to transfer files and charge battery.
Cons: Video quality could have been better, maybe some more control would have helped. Software was sluggish and too simple for our tastes.
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Full Pure Digital Flip Mino Review:
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Design - Very good
The Pure Digital Flip Mino is a tiny, compact camcorder. It resembles an iPod Classic, with the screen up top and the single, round button in the middle. There are other controls that light up when the device is turned on, and these are all controlled by touch sensitive keys. The Flip Mino is about the size of a Nokia N95 multimedia smartphone, which should be the perfect size because we think the best audience for this device will be folks who want much better image quality than their cameraphones can provide.
We had no problem with the touch sensitive buttons, but once or twice they did misfire on us. Still, Pure Digital includes a delete lock feature, so even if you press the wrong key, you won't lose valuable footage. Unfortunately, once or twice we didn't press the right key hard enough, apparently, and lost out on capturing some spur of the moment video.
One of our favorite design features on the Pure Digital Flip Mino is the pop-up USB connector. Pull a switch on the side of the device and the USB port appears, allowing you to plug the camcorder directly into your PC. The Flip Mino worked great connected to our USB hub and even our Macbook Air, which has a notoriously finicky USB port. Even better, the device charges its battery via USB, an even comes with all its own software preloaded, so you can install from the Flip Mino itself the first time you plug it into your Mac or Windows PC. This is a nice, elegant way of keeping the device self-contained and compact; no extra cords or software disks needed.
Video quality - Good
We didn't expect much from the Pure Digital Flip Mino, so we were pleasantly surprised by the video quality we saw. Of course, there were some obvious problems, but under the best lighting conditions and with a steady hand, the videos we recorded looked pretty good. Even sound quality was okay, thanks to the improved microphone on this newer model in Pure Digital's Flip line.
The Flip Mino records videos at 640 by 480 pixel resolution, which is the same as a standard DVD. These files are compressed as MPEG-4 files in an .avi container, which means they are friendlier out of the box to Windows machines than Macs, but with the right plugin installed (Perian), we had no trouble viewing them on both our machines. When you want to upload videos, the included software compresses them even further so that they take up about 1/10 of their original disk space. So, a 15 second video that took up 16MB of space is compressed to about 1.6MB. Since these extra-compressed videos are what you'll probably be uploading to YouTube or other sharing sites, that's what we've included here.
Graduation day
Our first video is a clip taken at a High School graduation. Lighting was much more dim in person than this clip suggests, and the camera did a nice job adjusting. Colors looked great in the video. We didn't get much detail, especially from the faraway faces, but the microphone did its work capturing the names being read over the din of the noisy crowd. Also notice that the sound didn't distort when this editor screams as a favorite former student gets his diploma. The worst part about this clip is the camera shake, thanks to our shaky grip. A tripod would have helped, and there is a tripod mount centered on the bottom of the camera, but image stabilization should be the next upgrade to the Flip line from Pure Digital, even before HD recording or wireless capabilities are added.
Tug-of-war with the pooch
Under poor, yellowish indoor lighting, the Flip Mino didn't perform nearly as well. Plenty of digital artifacts were visible as tiny blocks on the screen, and when the action heated up, the video got much more blurry. Sound was okay, and the camcorder did a fine job capturing the ferocious growl, but video was our main concern. We saw very little detail in the beige carpeting, and our poor white dog was rendered grey by the Flip Mino. Still pretty good in a pinch, and much better than what we would get from a similarly-sized camera phone, but not up to real camcorder standards.
Features - Poor
There really are no features to speak of on the Flip Mino. The camcorder shoots on full auto all the time. The only settings menu controls the time and date stamp, and the user has no control over image settings, lighting or exposure controls or anything, really. With the Flip Mino you record video or you can watch video, and that's it. For such a simple camcorder, we wouldn't need much more than that, but some white balance or exposure control would have helped a lot.
Software - Mediocre
Perhaps as regular Mac users we have a higher standard for free video editing software, but Pure Digital's Flip Video application was very disappointing. It was obviously designed to be simple, but it has been reduced to the point that some features are difficult to use, and others don't seem to work at all. The software was quite unresponsive, perhaps owing to the fact that we were loading it each time off of the flash memory on the Flip Mino. A few times it crashed while performing a longer function, like saving or e-mailing videos. In fact, these functions can take quite a while. E-mailing a 15-second clip took more than 3 minutes; and worst of all, the e-mail never arrived at it's destination, though we got an e-mail in our own box telling us it had been sent.
Editing a video was a pain, as there is no obvious way to save changes to a clip. You can "Save New," but this isn't exactly what we wanted, and there was no simple "Save" button. We were also confused by the software's choice of saving destinations. Sometimes our videos were saved to a folder on our desktop. Other times they were placed in a folder in our default "Documents" directory.
This software should have been much snappier and more intuitive all around. It did a fine job uploading directly to YouTube and AOL Videos, but there should have been more options, as Pure Digital forgoes even the most basic commands and features to make things as simple as possible.
Price and availability
The Pure Digital Flip Mino will start selling for $180 () in July 2008.
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