There’s a new market emerging for cheap, YouTube-quality digital video recorders that are easy to use. That’s where this product comes in.

The Flip MinoHD is the successor to the Flip Mino, a standard-definition digital camcorder that recorded to it’s own internal memory and had a no-frills interface, making it easy for novice computer users (and novice directors) to take videos. The Flip MinoHD pretty much stays in that same vein but has some nice bonuses for the price it retails at ($229 retail, $207 on amazon.com at the time of this writing).

First Impressions

The MinoHD’s retail box immediately reminded me of an Apple product box; very sleek, refined packaging. The unit I received was gloss black. I was impressed by how little space the device takes up. It’s extremely small and light, and other than the springy USB trigger, has no moving parts.

Specs

The MinoHD differs from the earlier Mino models in that now it records video files in 1280×720 (referred to as 720p in the HD world). It uses the popular H.264 MPEG 4 codec to store video, which allows you to store approximately 60 minutes of video in it’s 4GB of fixed internal memory.

The device has a fixed lens that offers “digital zoom” (digital cropping, not an actual zoom). I’ve used hand-held recorders with optical zoom in the past such as the Sanyo Xacti HD series of digital camcorders. I really liked having that feature on those models, but this recorder is much cheaper than the best Sanyo Xacti model I’ve used, which is the Sanyo Xacti HD1010.

The device weighs only 3.3 oz, easily fits in a shirt or jacket pocket, and has a USB interface that flips out from within the device to make it easy to plug into any USB port and start importing your video files.

The rear of the MinoHD has a few touch-sensitive buttons for deletion and playback of videos, a physical (non-touch sensitive) record button, and a very small, non-widescreen 1.5″ LCD. I was kind of disappointed in the LCD not being at least widescreen format, since the videos it takes are widescreen format themselves. Maybe this will be in the next incarnation.

Video Quality / Recording Video

The MinoHD’s video quality is variable depending on the level of light and how stable the camera is. I’ve found the MinoHD works best in good light (outdoors) and standing still while panning around and recording. Video taken this way looks pretty darn good. However, there’s no image stabilization to be found in this camera, which makes it really jarring to watch some clips that are recorded if you’re moving while filming.

The low-light performance was adequate, but washed out a lot of the picture and was noisy. I wouldn’t expect amazing low-light performance from a video camera this cheap, but it still is a bit annoying. The camera does have a standard tripod mount on the bottom for more stable recording.

The audio recording is also nothing amazing, but it works. The camera captures a lot of high frequencies, and the sound seems like it lacks depth. I’m not really hung up on this feature myself, though. There is not a separate place to plug in a microphone on the device, so you’re stuck with this mic if you decide to use this camera.

As stated earlier, it records video to 1280×720 H.264 MP4 files, which can be played in Apple’s QuickTime Player, VLC, or the bundled application with the camera. They are immediately compatible with YouTube or Vimeo without any software tweaking.

I tried taking a few short videos (under a minute) and uploading them to YouTube straight from the camera itself. The process is simple, I uploaded straight from the device to YouTube like it was a USB thumb drive. You can also use Flip’s built in software on the device (which works on both PC and Mac) to edit or manage your video files before uploading.

General Impressions / Final Thoughts

If I had to give a recommended buyer for this camera, It’d be a person who doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on gadgets, and who wants to take high-definition video on the go in a very portable way. I can see why this unit’s predecessor sold so well.

The MinoHD has the same feature set as a disposable camera (cheap, fixed-focus lens, very little control) in an easy to use form factor. It’s affordable, especially when compared to other digital video recorders in the market today.

For the price, I’d say to definitely give it a try if something like this sounds useful to you. You can even customize it with any graphic/color combination you wish when it’s ordered through the Flip website, which I found kind of neat.

If I had to give my own point of view on how I use the MinoHD, I find it to be a bit limiting – and for a few hundred dollars more (the price of say, a Sanyo Xacti HD1010, you can get much more flexibility, better overall video quality, and some level of image stabilization. But I’m probably not the target market for this product. Or am I?