Flip - off
I saw a strange ad on TV this evening and only at the end did I understand the product pitch. They were selling theFlip. I recognized it immediately. It was an upgrade of the CVS one-time use camcorder. Like the CVS version, theFlip has a fixed lens. The big different is it is 640×480 video rather than the CVS 320×240. The second difference is that it has a USB interface to download the video. *BUT* this second difference is not as big as you may think. It is very easy to hack the CVS one-time use to add a USB plug and software to download the video is free on the web.
I bought one of these CVS one-time use cameras for about $20. It took me about 15 minutes to hack it and another 5 minutes to install the software and download the first video. It worked as documented on the Internet.
Would I recommend it to others ? It’s good if you need to put a video camera in harms way. Otherwise, there a a lot of better options. Most point-and-shoot cameras can shoot video. Most reasonably modern digital camcorders can download to a computer. And if you want the smoothest of solutions, there are a number of current camcorders that record to a hard disk and will make downloading a breeze.
