As the Internet has risen, the average American's taste in video entertainment has fallen. And a good thing, too.
No longer do we insist on the sterile professionalism of the cineplex or the prime-time TV lineup. These days we happily spend hours watching amateur videos at websites like YouTube, most of them pretty poor quality. But more than a few display enough originality and intelligence to make you forget their technical flaws.
Now that we've come to appreciate these cheaply made videos, get ready for a lot more of them. Electronics companies are serving up a horde of bare-bones camcorders - shirt-pocket-sized devices that cost around $150 and run on a couple of flashlight batteries.
Pure Digital Technologies Inc. of San Francisco launched the craze in 2007 with its Flip Video line of cameras. It's on its way to becoming the iPod of personal video, with more than a million Flips sold in one year. The latest high-end model, the $150 Flip Video Ultra, doubles onboard memory to two gigabytes and buffs up the video resolution in a bid to deliver sharper images.
I got hold of a Flip Ultra and a couple of rivals - the $100 RCA Small Wonder EZ201 and the $150 DXG 567V HD. I've given list prices for all three cameras, but they're available for less at retail; for instance, at Amazon.com the RCA is selling for around $90, the DXG for $131, and the Flip Ultra as low as $123. None of these gadgets is designed for serious videography. They're for casual shooters on a tight budget. But I was pleasantly surprised by the DXG camera, a no-name product with video quality that trumps its better-known rivals.
The market-leading Flip cameras are entirely self-contained, with no way to add memory. The Ultra model can store about an hour of video. It's child's play to use. Shove in the batteries, hit the on switch, and press the red button to start shooting. When you're done, a switch on the side causes a USB data port to pop out like a digital switchblade. Plug it into a PC or Macintosh computer, and the camera appears as an external hard drive. You can drag your videos out of the folder or rely on built-in video management software that'll catalog them and help you e-mail clips to your friends.
Anyone who's ever fiddled with more expensive camcorders can understand the Flip's popularity. It's a point-and-click movie camera, as simple as an old Kodak Instamatic. But the Instamatic probably took sharper pictures. Flip videos are good enough, in a home-movie way. But they have a soft, fuzzy look to them; even faces in close-up seem a bit hazy. And the camera's pretty much useless for shooting far-off objects. Forget about the zoom feature - it's digital zoom, the kind where the onboard computer electronically enlarges the tiny picture elements or pixels that make up the image. The result is muddy and indistinct, and the little screens on these cameras don't convey just how bad the zoomed video will look on your computer monitor or TV. Count on getting decent footage while in zoom mode, and you'll suffer an ugly disappointment
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